


Umbra Nihili

by Cluegirl



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-19
Updated: 2010-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:59:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the other side of the veil, Sirius Black finds himself in a world of smoke and mirrors, to which Harry Potter seems to have a sort of a key.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

SIRIUS!

_Names have power. This is the law upon which magic is built -- from charms to curses to potions. The naming of a thing, properly applied, defines and reveals its basic nature. And thus the naming of a person, of a creature, of a demon or a god, can, under certain circumstances of intent and focus, bind the named to the namer's will. A wise mage never speaks a name without consideration of the forces set in motion thereby._

The room is like nothing I've ever seen. It's crammed with Muggle garbage from floor to ceiling -- toys, all broken, machines in pieces, a few books that look like they've hardly been touched except when that fat little shite needed something to stand on to reach the biscuit tin. From the inside, you can see how the shutters over the window aren't for light at all but to keep a too-thin boy from climbing out and running away. I already know how from the outside you can see holes in the brick where the bars were bolted in. The door has locks on the outside and a gaoler's pass-through at the bottom, which is a laugh, really, since it's not even wood all the way through and the hinges are on the inside. Half a minute with a bit of wire and two good kicks and even a little thing like Harry could be through it.

Muggles.

The bed is thin and narrow, like an afterthought typical to this soulless place. He's put drawings up on the walls above it -- Hedwig, the Gryffindor lion, a few others. I'm sure they're his work, though none are signed. They aren't half bad. Why didn't I ever know he could draw? Why didn't he show me these? Why didn't I know to ask?

There's a wardrobe beside the mirror. It cuts off half my view of him when he's in the bed, even with the doors closed tight. There isn't much room inside it -- I've checked it in the reflection, so I know it's crammed tight with more of Fat Shite the Younger's pointless crap -- but Harry's clothes don't take up much space at all, do they? A few pants -- not enough to last a week without his washing them in the sink, I noticed -- two pair of castoff trousers, four shirts, one pair of mismatched socks. No coat. No sign of his school robes. No sign of his school things at all, after that first night here when he handed over his trunk to Fat Shite the Elder.

Other than the pictures taped to the wall and the empty owl cage in the corner, it's hard to find much of Harry at all in this room unless he's actually _here_. He doesn't live here, not really. He doesn't _live_ here, that's for damn sure! Only when he's stretched out, too small in that too-small bed, can I even imagine my godson in this plastic Muggle prison.

But the bed is empty right now -- I'd be able to see part of his feet if he were, even if he was balled up tight and shaking from nightmare. (Go on, ask me how I know.) If I were to turn away from this icy glass over the desk, I could leave this room, walk down the washed-out stairs, past the eerily static Muggle photos of _ familia atrocis_. I could find Harry's reflection washing up for them down in the kitchen.

But I don't want to see Harry's reflection. I want to see Harry.

Because he's the reason I'm still trapped here. Because his lips shape my name silently when his dreaming mind fills up with it. Flickers of teeth through dry lips as he shapes the word over and over again till the syllables bleed and blur and it becomes less my name than a nonsense mantra sung by an idiot monk. Unheard, inexorable, the syllables dig into me like fishhooks weighted with anvils, and they _drag_ me back from wherever in this reflected world I've managed to wander. They haul me back here to pin myself against this icy, futile pane of glass where, even if Harry was awake, he wouldn't fucking see me.

When he's awake, distracted, arsing about or doing his house-elf routine, I can get out a bit, though the reflections get shallow and slippery in the wide open between mirrors. I'm a clever hound though, and the Muggle autos all have mirrors on them, so if I keep to the roads, if I start out early, early, early, and run for all I'm worth, I can get...

I can get agonizingly close to Grimmalud Place before the yanking starts again and I find myself here -- portkeyed back to Harry's darkened bedroom by his stiff breath and the unspoken sound of my name, trapped here under glass until he's finished thrashing about in that too-damn-small bed for the night. Only took once or twice before I saw the utter futility of keeping up with _that_ routine.

Yeah, listen to me; Sirius Black, heartless fucking bastard who wants to lark off and ditch his poor Godson all alone and trapped in this Muggle freakshow. Yeah, me, wanting to piss off and leave the kid all pale and sweating and fighting in his sleep with nobody who loves him to watch over him until he wakes. This would be me, fooling no one.

It's hell to watch, that. He doesn't do it every night though. Sometimes he manages to fill himself up with _Siriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusi  
riusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusir  
iusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusirius  
iriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusiriusiriusiriusiusiriusiriusirius_   
and there's no room for nightmares in between. Not even much room for breath, it sometimes seems.

He strains hard on nights like that, and although he lies still and pale where the moonlight slashes across his too-thin blankets, it seems to me that he's almost rocking back and forth on the word in his mind. Lying motionless and flat while tossing his head against the pillows so his slender throat works in rolling pulses and his downy hair licks with sweat and static in every which direction at once.

And I know he's working hard, hard, hard in his sleep. And I know he's going to wake up exhausted and grey-lipped in the morning, but I can't stop him. I can't wake either him OR his reflection, and there's no room for me on that damned sliver of a bed, so all I can do is pace the confines of this reflected cell and listen to him thinking my name. Endlessly.

I almost hate him on those nights, but what can I do? Shake his Reflection? Shout at it? Steal its blankets and bloody well dump its bed over onto the floorboards? It wouldn't stop the real Harry dreaming. It might not have any effect at all, in fact, which is what makes me stop short every time. If I'm really that much of a ghost... I don't want to know it for sure.

Then, the other nights, the stubborn litany fails and his exhaustion lets us both sleep. And sometimes we both get away with it -- Harry, half-glimpsed around the side of the shadows and me in a dog's form across his reflection's feet, where I can see both of them. Sometimes we both sleep like dead things through the silent hours.

But other times it's a war. Other times his lax silence gives in to whispered pleas, denials ground out through teeth tight as duty; thrashing and struggling and hissing in parseltongue and gutter English while even his Reflection's scar bleeds.

There's no sleeping then. Once Voldemort's sunk his claws in, there's nothing either of us can do but wait for it to stop. Believe me, I've tried everything else. I can hold his Reflection, clamp its struggles down, bind it tight in the narrow sheets, but Harry can't feel it. I can whisper, talk, soothe, sing, scream and plead with his Reflection, but Harry can't hear my words. I can drag his Reflection to the floor and kick its narrow little arse, but it doesn't stop the dream. It doesn't set Harry, or his Reflection, free.

Nor me neither.

~*~

First few days after, it was a shock, plain and simple. I wandered about the mirrored world just like the ghost I was meant to be, first at Hogwarts, chilling the mirrors dead and still whenever I'd step foot into them. But not even the ghosts could see me, and the paintings went slowly still whenever I'd step into the frame.

Then Harry broke James' mirror, and I got mad. Mad at Harry -- for risking his fool life, for making me go after him, for forgetting to use the thrice damned mirrors. I shouted and cursed him and raged and called him everything but a child of God while he... while he just sat there on his bed, or wandered about the castle like a ghost himself. Like a piece of him -- the most important piece of all -- was dead inside him. And just like the paintings, Hogwarts' classrooms and common rooms went slowly still whenever Harry stepped inside.

Then I got mad at me.

Then, once Harry brought me here and I learned what sort of a place they'd left him to, I got mad at them. Each one in turn as they'd show up for their weekly visits. He'd sit with them in the kitchen, make tea and smalltalk while Horseface would clean bitterly in the lounge, and I would vent my ghostly spleen on the name of whatever Order member had drawn the short matchstick, and had to come verify Harry's continued survival this week.

Then Moony came.

It was nearly enough to break me. To watch his face and know he couldn't see me, he couldn't smell me, couldn't feel my presence no matter how hard I yearned toward him...Dementors are easier on the soul.

He left without a glance at the hallway mirror. He didn't see me screaming and beating the thing until my fists froze and bled. He just walked by, weary and careful and determined; my Moony who could never, ever give up. My Moony, who bore up under curses, bigotry, betrayal, poverty, hatred, abandonment and despair, and just kept on walking.

Kept on walking. Down the hallway. Out the door. Away from me.

For a dangerous moment I nearly hated Harry all over again. Only he looked so miserable there in the kitchen, washing up the tea things while Horseface glowered at him, he looked so small and determined, and at the same time so damned lost. I hadn't the heart.

Because Harry had only done what I did myself that night; he rushed blindly to try and save someone he loved. One or the other of us was probably going to die in the Department of Mysteries that night, no matter how the evening was sliced, so of course it had to be me; Harry'd never learned how.

I kept away from the mirrors the next few times Moony came. Because I couldn't count the new silver hairs quickly enough. Because I couldn't map the weary lines as he smiled for Harry. Because I couldn't watch him walking away without wanting to fly apart like James' shattered mirror.

I can accept certain truths if I have to, because I can't change them. I'm dead. Moony isn't. He mourns me, but he keeps going because he has to. Because Harry needs him. And Merlin, how Harry needs him...

I can accept it.   
But nobody said I had to watch.

~*~

He keeps a journal.   
What _boy_ does that, I ask you? Boys don't have time for sitting at their desk and scribbling page after page of cramped handwriting into a composition book left over from school term -- boys have girls to watch and Quidditch to play and younger siblings to torment and pranks to dream up for next term. Boys have homework to ignore and rules to break and summer adventures to have while they're still cunning enough to get away with it.

But not my Harry. He has his owl. And he has his book, and he has his dreams. And nothing else seems to get through to him.

It's my fault.

It's because I died on him. Because I left him all alone.

I know what he's writing in there. I don't have to read it to know, because sometimes he tears out pages and tries to get the owl to take them somewhere -- to someone she knows better than to try to find. The scratch of his pen is just as strong a draw as his nocturnal whispers.

It's my fault.

Merlin damn me.

That thought is thick in my throat as I watch him, looking past his reflection to the glimmering tears that never fall from his eyes, no matter how often they build up there -- at least not while he's awake. That thought, that silent guilt.

"I'm so sorry, Harry," I say, and as usual the words sound flat and hollow and as lifeless as the wand I carried with me through the veil. A shadow without the dust to back it up, and doesn't that twist like a knife underneath my heart? But... but did he hesitate? Just there, mid word where his quill trembled and bled a single drop of ink?

I'm not sure I still have a heart, but I know it's in my throat right now, watching his eyes -- Lily's eyes in James' face, with nobody but my Harry staring out of them -- raise to the glass and _stare_. As if he heard me. _As if he could almost see me_!

A moment later, his Reflection is on its arse, and I'm pressed up against the icy mirror, pounding my fists against it and screaming his name while the ink bottle topples and drips black reflections across my foot.

He takes a breath. I hold mine.

Then Harry sighs, shakes his head and goes back to writing. His ink bottle is where he left it -- still full of words I can't make myself read. Still full of everything I should have been for him, but never managed to. My hand drops to the desktop, fingers trailing through the black stream.

**I'm so sorry Harry,** I write on the facing, empty page. The words are thick and black and end in the whorls of my fingerprints. **I love you, please forgive me-** And I'm out of room. Out of time. Again. He's moving on to the second page in the real world, where my stained fingers have made no mark. Where I don't exist anymore.

It's easier to deal with this as a dog.  
Or the ghost of one, anyhow.

 

~*~

 

I wake under the bed to the sound of my name. I can hear him, _feel_ him like usual, but there's something different. This isn't the dry-leaf dementor whisper I've grown used to. There's juice behind this. There's heart.

I smell sweat. I smell tears, but not nightmare. I smell sex, and I smell magic. The bed creaks a desperate rhythm over my head, and his low, needy voice wraps my own name around me like a stroking callused hand.

I'm hard myself by the time I've managed to get out from under the rickety bed.

The moonlight spills across him, ice white from the window. He's kicked the blanket free, and his hand is inside his pants, and suddenly the fact that he doesn't have pajamas is, straining at me from the bed in a panting sprawl of clutching fingers and working elbows and wide-splayed knees. His eyes are clenched closed, but I'm sure he isn't asleep. There's need strung taut all up that throat, across those arching ribs and deep-shadowed collarbones. His lip is caught between his teeth, but I can hear him saying it anyhow.

_Sirius touch me Sirius come Sirius love me Sirius want me Sirius touch me Sirius come back to me Sirius forgive me_

My bones hear it -- my blood hears it. My shadow hears it and shivers.

_Sirius touch me Sirius come Sirius love me Sirius want me Sirius touch me Sirius come back to me Sirius forgive me_

My cock hears it. And yearns.

Dear Merlin. How can I possibly be wanting him this much? Harry? My Godson. My God... My God.

His hand slips down, fingers digging deep behind his balls, pulling the worn fabric low and giving me a rolling glimpse of his prick; glistening and dark. The smell of him rises like incense -- all musk and desperation, and I blister myself on the glass just trying to press close to him.

_Sirius touch me Sirius come Sirius love me Sirius want me Sirius touch me Sirius come back to me Sirius forgive me_

His fingers are driving into himself now, pants pulled low under his bollocks so the knuckles work and roll under the fabric, and his other hand clutches... why isn't he touching his cock with his other hand? Look how the tip is leaking over his belly, just begging to be strokedrolledsuckedswallowed, but he keeps that hand pressed against his chest, and...

And suddenly I know what it is he's got.

Because I had the other one in my pocket when I went through the veil. Because I've shouted into it for days on end and seen no echo, not even my own reflection in its deadened, glassy surface. Because I killed it when I killed my wand and myself. All the same, my fingers seek out its tepid corpse inside my pocket. Because he's pressing its shattered mate to his heart and his fingers are welling blood around the edge of it just as if it would make a difference, and he's _thinking_ those things at me, at it, and _I'm hearing him_, and I'm wanting him and grasping my own prick out of my robes while he fills himself with fingers that he imagines might feel like I would inside him and-

He arches up off the bed, cry locked behind a rictus snarl. Ropes of come fly from his jerking cock, spattering his belly, his chest, his face, the drawing on the wall. "Siriussss!" He breathes, and I can take no more.

Orgasm rips out of me like a chunk of my soul, steaming against the glass barrier while I twitch and gasp out his name in my shadowy corner of hell. Dying didn't feel anything like this, and I wonder for a moment or two if it was because I didn't do it properly the first time. But then the shocks are fading, and panting, I lean my forehead against the icy barrier.

He's sliding the mirror across his belly, mixing the blood from his fingers with his come. I imagine the brew streaked across the face of his little mirror, and I wonder what such primal magic from a boy like him could make out of the laws of living and dying...

But when I check my own mirror, it remains flat, grey, lifeless.

Damn.

"Sirius," he says, pressing the smeared mirror to his lips, "Sirius, I'm so sorry." His voice resonates through me like a bell, like a stunning spell, or a cruciatus so perfect it destroys only one nerve. His lip trembles, and I can _feel_ it. "I'm so, so sorry..."

He's never said it before, though a fool could have seen he was thinking it. And now that I hear his words I want to shake them off his lips, kiss them silent, lick them clean of blood and spunk and guilt. The cold from the glass is so steaming fierce it feels like my eyes are filling up with snow, but then through the blur I catch a glimpse of movement from the desk below me.

Futile instinct has me clutching the corpse of my wand out of my sleeve even as I'm crouching to stare. He's left his journal open on the desk just beneath the mirror. The page is filled with his round, lumpy script, but new words are drawling, sidelong and angled over the top of it **-em evigorf esaelp, uoy evol I,** the thick words curl our across the page, each ending in a flat, smudgy whorl of black, **yrraH yrros os m'I**

"Look Harry," it rattles out of me in a shocked wheeze, then louder -- a shout that has no business not bringing this cheap, crappy room down around our ears. "Harry, get the hell up and LOOK AT THIS!"

But no. He's curled into himself, asleep or grieving, and I have no goddamn patience left for it. Not now -- not when I can SEE the answer, see it written just there in the world, just where I'd put it in this hollow fucking reflection I'm haunting...

A Reflection.

Realization shocks through me like a splash into an ice bath. I spin on my heel, cross the tiny room in two strides and drag Harry's reflection forcibly from its foetal curl. His face is lax, sweat beginning to dry like the streaks of blood and semen across his milky skin. He's still clutching it to him -- pressing its shattered face to his belly now. It pulls free of his skin with a sticky sound, and it takes some work to convince Harry's sleeping Reflection to let me coax the tiny mirror out of his grasp.

His fingers seek after it, and he groans, panicking me and elating me at the same time -- he's reacting. To ME! I could shout for joy, but some instinct keeps me silent, keeps me quick. I slide my own dead mirror into his questing hand and gently curl him back up onto his side. Face to the wall, tight and shivering and...

The bed isn't exactly too small, if I pull him close against my chest and wrap myself around him.

It isn't too small at all.

 

~*~

 

Next day they have him outside, digging weeds in their sterile, castrated mockery of a garden. Apart from my ire at the principle of Harry, worth twenty of them, doing their elf-work, I'm actually for it. Anything that gets him out of this room, out of the looming shadow of Fat Shite the Younger's castoff trash is a good thing these days. At least outside, he can breathe, can see the sun and feel a bit of wind on his face. Not quite freedom, but until the summer ends and the Order ransoms him away from this prison at last, it's the best he or I can expect.

I've come down to watch him. The kitchen window is a bit vague, and the reflections here are shallower than in a proper mirror, but to be honest, the ghost of sunlight and wind does me good as well. And as long as Harry is here, reflected in the glass with me, it's not so bad.

I've brought his journal with me, and the broken mirror as well. The book is weighty in my hand, like an accusing stare from a friend who trusts you. I know he wouldn't want... well, I'd thought he wouldn't, until last night. Now though, I'm starting to feel like he leaves it there in front of the mirror on purpose. He doesn't even hide it when the Order members come to check on him (because he never writes the letters they ask him for, and so they have to come and be sure he's all right,) but none of them ever ask about it, and he never offers to explain.

So I've stolen its reflection. For all I know, the scene in the upstairs mirror might have repaired itself up there already, grown itself a place-holder, so as soon as I let go of this ragged composition book, the bloody thing will vanish. Like when you drop a painting, and it jerks reflexively back to the artist's lines -- back to step one, just as if I'd moved nothing at all -- it's what normally happens when I re-arrange things in my mirror world. But... I think on the talking mirror in my pocket, humming with magic and strangely _alive_, and I'm not so sure. It's stayed with me since I swapped it with my dead mirror, and that gives me hope.

And hope gives me ideas. Ideas that I might not be useless to Harry after all. Ideas that maybe now more than ever, I can be some bloody comfort to the boy. Ideas that _someone_ who doesn't despise Harry had bloody well better get a look inside his head before it's too late.

I perch on the wall, and turn to the latest entry.

_"I think I might be going mad."_ I glance at him, thin and spare and half-visible as he pulls grass and weeds from under the hydrangea bushes, and I wonder if I ever thought those words at his age.

_"I don't think it's the dreams,"_ his shaky script carries on, _"Not like the ones last year at Hogwarts. I learned my lesson from those. And anyway, he doesn't much like what he finds inside my head these days, I don't think."_ No question who that he is, more's the pity. _"The trick isn't to empty my mind. Snape had that all wrong, because nothing can really stay empty, can it?"_

"Nothing but Snape's flinty little heart," I say, plucking a long grass blade to chew on. The stem crunches between my thoughtful teeth, though the taste of it barely shadows my tongue. I crunch it harder.

_"Every night I empty my mind, just like Snape told me. That is, you know, I empty it of everything except for that one thing. That falling backward moment. The Veil. That's the only thing I keep, and I fill my head up with that till there's no room for anything else. Especially not voldemort."_ He doesn't capitalize the name, and glancing down the page, I see that he never does, even crossing the word out and beginning again when he forgets. A small rebellion against his own personal monster, I guess, but if it makes him feel better, I'm for it. I make a mental note to go back and cross out the capital S on snape's name too.

_"voldemort."_ He wrote again, and I laughed. _"I think he stopped trying when I started taking control of the memory. When you don't get telly or comics as a child, you learn how to do amazing things with only your imagination, you know? I've turned the Death Eaters into rabbits, into chickens and then exploded them, into piglets and set wolves to chase them down. And one time I turned them all into smoke and blew them through that archway._

He couldn't make me stop, you know? He tried to make me dream about what I knew, Dumbledore and the Order members, the part of the prophecy he never got to hear about, but he couldn't do it. That arch was just too big for him to move, and he couldn't make me wake up either. I thought I might throw him through it as well, you know? I thought I might grab him by his throat, and through he'd go, easy as anything. I think that's why he stopped pushing, really. Didn't want to see what would happen if I did."

And yes, for a moment I'm a little horrified; Harry, who knows just what that veil is, what it does, being able to just chuck people through the same endless gullet that swallowed me? Across the garden, he sits back on his heels, peeling off his too-big, too-thin shirt so the weak sun can count his ribs. He doesn't look like a murderer. What murderer has skin like new milk, darkening to just the slightest hint of caramel where short sleeves have laid his arms bare all summer? What murderer wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of one wrist, leaving soil smudged just _there_ under his damp fringe? What murderer pulls a drink from the hosepipe with such rose-soft lips, swallowing in waves along such an elegant throat?

If anyone looks a murderer, it's me, and I've never managed it, no matter how I tried. Which is odd, really. People do it so often; you'd think it would be easy.

But no; not Harry. Only then I really think about what he said. He never puts them through the veil as wizards, does he? Not even Voldemort himself, who deserves it if any dream-ghost does. No matter how hurt or hunted or harried he feels, no matter how he may hate them, if anything goes through the Gateway, it's not a human being. That says something important about his heart and his soul, really, something I'm pleased to see proof of, though I never really doubted it. And now I can appreciate his tenacity, his stubbornness, his sheer, balls-to-bone Gryffindorness in the face of that murdering bastard. Proud, Merlin but I'm proud of him!

As if in response to my thought, his diary continued, _"And I wouldn't. I really wouldn't. He doesn't belong there. He doesn't deserve it. Dumbledore was right when he said that just killing him wouldn't satisfy... voldemort's got to understand what he's paying for before he pays. He's got to know it, what it really means. Otherwise it means nothing. It's just another death in just another war that never changes anything at all. And it can't all mean nothing."_

"It doesn't," I say. Not because he needs to hear, which he does, but because by Merlin's bloody beard, I need to SAY it! I've died for this, left Moony alone for this, buried my best friend and shivered away half my life for this. It doesn't mean nothing. Not to me.

Harry looks over his shoulder, straight at the kitchen windows, where I sit on the reflected wall with his journal in my lap. My stomach clenches, then does it again as he fishes in his trouser pocket. I know what he's got in there -- its reflection gives a buzz and jump against my thigh as his fingers brush it. I hold my breath, wondering if Harry can feel that too, but he never takes his mirror out, and after awhile he turns back to his weeding again. I turn back to his book, pretending I'm not disappointed.

_"That night, after I felt voldemort go, I stood beside the arch and listened for a long time. And the whispers kept on getting clearer and clearer."_ The words bring a chill up my back. _And just before I woke up, I realized what they were all asking. A million voices all whispering the same question over each other at once, and I knew I should walk away as soon as I heard it. Because nothing that really means you any good ever asks you that question."_

_"I go back to that dream sometimes, now that I know how to do it,"_ his handwriting here, I notice, is very precise, not like his normal scrawl. I wonder if he might have felt that carefully-written, well-formed words would somehow make the thought he transcribed seem less mad. _"I go back to that moment and I listen to them whisper, but I don't ever let myself answer. It's like a game, you see? Like one of Snape's stupid tests, only without him making up rules to make me fail. Because they wouldn't ask if they didn't already know. And if they already know what I want, then I don't want to know what they'll take in trade for it."_

"So, diary..." I read his words aloud because the horror of them just won't _fit_ in my head otherwise "Does that makes me mad? Reckless and irresponsible and selfish and addicted to heroism like they all said?" And there the writing ends.

I look up across the garden, heart going like a herd of thestrals in my throat. He stretches toward the sun in unconscious, aching beauty, and it's almost too much.

"Oh Harry, no," I say to him, my stomach twisting with the memory of that whispered chorus of promises. An endless susurrus of promises and sly, knowing hints and velvety lies that almost take the place of air as you fall straight through… "You can't let them get to you. You can't even wonder or else they'll have won."

But he isn't listening. Not to me, anyhow. He's peering hard over his shoulder at the garden gate. I can't see it from here, but the expression on his face is all I need to know just whose shadow is falling long and slick across the grass. The Fat Shites, both elder and younger are inside with the air conditioner and the telly, and even Horseface at her worst doesn't get that spike of loathing out of him. It can only be Snape. Pardon me, I should say "snape."

"Well, Mr. Potter," the greasy bastard snipes, "I can see from here that neither of your hands is broken, ergo I must assume your lack of correspondence is due either to illiteracy, or a more profound self-obsession than normal. Though I confess I hadn't thought the latter actually possible."

If that damned chorus were within whispering range right now, I'd probably lose my soul in trade for a single clear bite at Snape's bony, pasty arse. But my Harry just sighs, wipes his face with his wadded shirt, and then goes to let the bastard into the garden.

"I can make tea," he says, turning toward the kitchen door as the great flapping bat follows him across the lawn. "They've only got Earl Grey though."

"Having overseen your brewing skills for the past five years, Potter," Snape replies, dripping spite as Harry slips his grubby shirt back on before opening the kitchen door, "I must decline. I have not come for your tea, or what passes for your 'charming' company. I am here merely to ascertain that your mortal coil remains as-yet unshuffled despite your arrogant refusal to set quill to parchment as you had been instructed-" the rest is lost in the closing of the door.

It takes me a moment to find a reflection inside so I can follow them. Harry keeps the tea kettle in the kitchen spotless, so I could go there, but the warp of it makes me dizzy. I head for the mirror in the hallway just outside the kitchen door, but they're already going up the stairs, Snape trailing his elaborate insults behind him like a grotesque bridal train. I swear to Godric he stays up nights thinking up those things when any other red blooded male would be wanking his way to sleep.

"No, there haven't been any more dreams," Harry is lying to Snape by the time I catch up with them in his bedroom mirror. And he's not good at lying, my Harry, this I've come to know, so how he manages that perfect mix of weary annoyance, boredom, and innocent audacity, I have no idea. But it's pure and perfect and it would have fooled even me if I hadn't been witness to his night terrors for the last four weeks.

Snape's eyes glitter and I bite my tongue as he as he scowls down his nose at Harry. "I shall assume this to mean the Dark Lord finds your summer of self-pity as boring as the rest of us then," he says, "for I know better than to suppose you are actually _applying_ yourself to keeping him out."

And yeah, the growl only stays in my throat for half a second before I'm leaning close to that icy glass and hazing it over with a foggy snarl. "You'd love that, wouldn't you? Believing he's bloody useless without you to mess his brain about and call it 'lessons', you sadistic tosser-"

"I suppose you're right." The calm in Harry's voice stops me cold. Resignation, that's what it is, surrender, but not to Snape. We both stare at him, Snape and I, but Harry's head is turned, his gaze somewhere far off beyond the window glass. He looks tired. He looks beaten, and when he turns back at the lengthening silence his half-smile doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "He must be bored with me. Can't think why else he'd never..." He finishes in a shrug.

I realize in a cold rush that Harry isn't talking about Voldemort at all.

"And I take it you suppose that is adequate to excuse you from maintaining your Occlumency exercises each night?" Snape is suddenly all towering outrage. "Has your carelessness not cost us enough, Potter?"

"You utter gobshite!" I sling the book at the desk and smash both fists against the glass, too furious to even mind the burn. "How DARE you use me against him when it's YOU who can't be arsed to look him in the eye and find out what he's living through night after night! You can't teach him to defend himself, but you can stand there and kick him for being vulnerable just to make yourself feel important, can't you, Snivellus? Can't you, you Slytherin, belly-crawling HEM-KISSER?!"

Harry's back stiffens. He turns his head just _so_. Not enough to look at my mirror square on, but enough to barely glimpse in case my shadow might actually be there. I've seen him do this hundreds of times. But I've never seen him actually _catch_ that glimpse. I've never seen his face go so suddenly white and his lips go lax with surprise, a soft, startled gleam of teeth and hope that dares make no sound at all, never seen him shocked so still it seems he could forget to breathe.

"Potter!" Harry starts in his chair as Snape looms over him, glaring. "What are you up to?"

"N-nothing," he gulps. I scramble to fetch the hand-mirror out of my robes as he tries again. "Nothing, Professor."

"Don't look at me," I tell him, my lips brushing the surface as my numbed fingers tingle back to life around the little mirror's edge, "hold his eyes, Harry. Hold his eyes and _mean it_!" I watch his fingers tighten on his lap, just above the pocket he's got his mirror in. And he doesn't look away, even when Snape leans down into his face and snarls.

"I don't believe you."

Harry shrugs. "That's your problem."

I could cheer if I didn't think it would distract him. Snape's face goes a stunning shade of chalk with twin stripes of rage like war paint across his cheeks, but before he can launch one of his well-rehearsed tirades, the door to Harry's room flies open.

"Boy! You're wanted in the kitchen," Fat Shite the Elder's voice booms, "Tell him to go now." Harry breathes again as Snape's glower shifts focus. I wonder for a moment if I might actually not mind listening to the greasy bastard rant for once, but apparently he thinks better of wasting his 'wit' on a muggle. He gives a practiced sneer, and pulls his wand from his sleeve to apparate.

"Here now," Far Shite shocks him still with a bellow, shoving through the doorway to put a finger up at Snape. "I'll have none of that here!"

"Uncle Vernon, Professor Snape was just going to-"

"Excuse me?" Snape oils over Harry's attempt to mollify the man. "Were you addressing me, you corpulent error of natural selection?"

"Petunia says we've got to let _your sort_ in to check on the little freak, but I won't have that unnatural claptrap going on in my house, you hear me?" Fat Shite fills up every available space in the room with puce skin and flying spittle. "No pig's tails, no flying cars, no monstrous tongues, no blowing decent people up like balloons, no dementors, NO BLOODY MAGIC!" his fat finger jabs right in between Snape's buttons, driving him back one step exactly. "That was the agreement for our taking the boy back in, and I won't have you waving that bloody stick of yours about in here, or you can just take him right along with you when you go!"

Harry sighs loudly, belaying Snape's return shout. "I'll just go down to the kitchen," he says, climbing over the bed to get round the pair of them, nose to nose in his sorry excuse for a bedroom.

The urge to follow him downstairs is immense -- I could care less what these two excretions have to say to each other, and it's only spectator curiousity that keeps me in the room. I'm wondering whether I'm more enjoying Snape getting bossed around by a fat, stupid muggle, or waiting for said fat muggle to realize that the wizard he's shouting at is holding a deadly weapon.

A deadly weapon. Very deadly. Very powerful. The backbone of any wizard's magic, when both the wand and the wizard are alive...

It's done almost before I've even thought about doing it. A lunge across the reflected room, a shove to send Fat Reflected Shite sprawling, and I've snatched that deadly weapon out of reflected Snape's hand. In the real room, Harry's owl gives a flutter and Snape bites off his shout mid-word. He grips his wand hand with his other and gapes suspiciously at the wand still clenched in his bloodless grip. His reflection is bare inches from me, empty hand groping blindly through the air after me as those bitter black eyes comb the room for the source of his discomfiture.

I slap the corpse of my wand into his reflection's hand and head for the door, getting another good kick in at Fat Shite on my way past. Can't risk Snivellus catching sight of me in the glass, after all. That greasy bastard always had a reasonable talent at spotting the details everyone else missed, and I know one thing as sure as I know my name; If Snape knew where I'd got to, the kind of life I'm reduced to living, he'd choke on his smugness. Better than Azkaban for the likes of me, he'd think. And selfish as it seems, I'd just about sooner give up what life I have than give that greasy bastard that kind of satisfaction.

I can feel his eyes on the glass I've just left, as heavy as a glare between my shoulderblades, but I can't help grinning to myself as I settle into the hallway mirror and give my new wand a flourish. He's no hope of spotting what isn't there, no matter how he glares. Not even those eyes can see around reflected corners, after all.

I listen to Harry 'yes-ma'am' ing Horseface in the kitchen, and I settle in with a grin, waiting for Snape to finish shouting with Fat Shite upstairs. I figure if I follow Snivelly's reflection out to where it starts to get hazy, he'll never see the boil hex coming. And with the feel of a live wand warming my palm again, it's no stretch to imagine it just might stick until the next time Snape glimpses himself in a mirror. Imagining his expression makes for the most fun I've had in weeks.

The day is definitely looking up.


	2. Chapter 2

"Say my name, Harry."

His lips press tightly closed instead. Anger and hatred and fury glint in those eyes that have never once resembled James's. The tattered veil flutters behind the boy and the (not)ghost, reaching, whispering, wondering, tempting Harry to Orpheus' mistake. But my Harry, my clever, stubborn boy, won't turn back, won't look the pleading ghost in the eye, won't breathe a syllable of the name that's kept me close by his side all this time.

He's thinking it though. His lifeline/ mantra/ white noise fills up the staticky fringes of my awareness as it has on so many nights past. Only now I know how to get inside. My name and Snape's wand draw me into Harry's tormented dream. The rolling, repeating sibilants pave the way, limning the entrance with desperation and distrust. A blinking sign over the top reading _Sirius' entrance_ couldn't make it more plain. Snape's wand, past master at _Legilimens_, thumbs open the latch and shows me the hidden pathway into Harry's lonely darkness.

And no, as a matter of fact, I _don't_ think twice.

Voldemort is clever, I suppose, in his sadistic way, but he doesn't know me well enough to pull the impersonation off. I'm sure I wasn't that skinny, that hard-worn and haggard. I know my voice never whined so desperately when I spoke Harry's name. My hand never shook so, and I can hardly watch those cracked and ragged fingernails graze just close enough to spread gooseflesh across Harry's tight-held, trembling neck without wanting to roll my eyes in disgust. I'm sure my eyes knew how to stay grey, and didn't flicker with angry crimson depths, however often Harry failed to turn, look, or acknowledge my voice.

The bastard's playing for sympathy, all silvery and floating, voice thin and spectral, urgent with promise and hope, and almost _almost_ enough to cover the Chorus' endless question. He thinks he has Harry's number, thinks he can use grief and regret and that barely-heard offer to sew his enemy up in the curse of getting what you always thought you wanted, and then getting the bill.

But Voldemort doesn't know how many nights Harry's spent right on that spot, memorizing that endless, unchanging offer. He Who Chose A Really Stupid Name might just as well have draped my image in chains and called himself Jacob Marley for all the good his sense of High Slytherin Melodrama's done him. My Godson's not fooled by that pantomime spectre any more than he's tempted by the Chorus.

Except I can see his wand hand, and the fingers are white and shaking against the wood. This fight is costing him. The livid slash of his scar across his white forehead makes for a telling tally. Harry stares at the top row of the amphitheatre, white lipped and hard-eyed. If I took two large steps to the left, that fierce gaze would be trained straight through me. But some instinct keeps me still and silent in the shadows of Harry's dream. Wouldn't do to distract him, I tell myself. Harry might see me, but then so might that idiot whinging and pleading behind him. Don't want to throw an advantage away now, do I?

Harry's left hand is clenched against his breast, pressing something flat and square to his bare chest, just beneath his collarbone. I lift my stolen mirror -- shattered, but alive -- to my lips and give him a whisper. "Oh, you clever boy."

He starts, his lips flush with surprise as he stops biting them. His eyes flash my name, and my heart surges as they focus on me -- as he _sees me_ at last. At long bloody last! But I press the talking mirror to my lips and whisper, "Hush! Not a word now."

He doesn't nod, but his fingers tighten on his own mirror for answer. He follows me only with his eyes as I slide along the wall, seeking a clear shot at my ghostly doppelganger.

The temptation to blast the bastard through the veil, I will admit, is profound. He's positioned with such ironic precision; it wouldn't even take an unforgivable to send him through, but something in Harry's eyes stops me. As if I don't have the right to kill Voldemort, even in Harry's dreams. And seeing as how this _is_ his dream, and I'm flying entirely by instinct anyhow, who am I to argue?

Still, he's come here pretending to be a ghost, so I banish him as I would any real spectre; a wand-slash of liquid gold light, and a shouted "_Exadigo_!" And the startled, furious spook spins wildly, collapsing into himself with a shrilling whistle like a kettle boiling dry. Then he's gone, leaving ringing ears and stinging silence in his wake.

Harry lowers his mirror. I can see the jagged reverse of its cracks pressed into his sweaty, trembling chest. His wand is in his hand still but his eyes aren't quite full up with hope, and dear Merlin, he sees me! He holds my gaze with those wild, wide eyes, and I can practically feel the weight of his stare, filling my lungs like air, my veins like blood, making me realer than I've been in weeks, and I would do anything -- anything, you understand -- not to lose that feeling.

But it's not my dream, and I'm not the first ghost to wear this seeming tonight. I have to ask, though the question snags resentfully across the cracked, salty mirror in my hand. "Want to wake up, Harry?"

His eyes flutter closed and his breath staggers as if I'd pressed the question to his throat. I can see his cock filling in his threadbare pants, and Merlin help me, I can feel my own responding to the sight -- reflecting every ounce of his desperate hunger.

Eyes clenched, he shakes his head. Takes a step. Takes another, then checks to be sure I'm still there. I'm still there. Truth is, my head's swimming so I'm not sure I could take a step without falling over. "Is it-?" he asks, barely audible over the Chorus's endless whisper. "Is it really-"

I hold up the mirror for answer, and I watch him work it out. He didn't tell anyone about my gift -- kept his mirror not quite safe, but very, very secret. Nobody who could use this mirror against him would know how.

His eyes crack with relief, and then suddenly he's flinging himself up the steps, barreling into me like a bludger, and clinging as we both go down. There's a step like a stone bootheel in my ribs, one bench that's cracked my right arm throbbing, and another that's toppled to pin my leg, and five stone of babbling, squirming boy atop me, his cock hard and grinding into my hip and his thigh pressing my aching bollocks too hard and it's the first time in weeks that someone -- anyone has touched ME because they meant to, and it's perfect, so bloody perfect!

"You're here you came oh God it's really you Siriu-" I lunge up, stop my name on his lips the only way I'm sure will work. He makes a sound that translates to 'ohgodyesplease' and his lips open to my tongue as though he's starving for it, as though it's life itself I'm thrusting into his mouth and he's sucking down in pleading, greedy draughts. My name/ his name/ no name thrums between us, caught in teeth and tongues and wanton, rapid grunts and he tears his mouth away, keening as I fill my hands with his arse and _drag_ him into place. Our cocks press tight into the soft, hot, sweaty space between us, Snape's wand presses tight into one velvety arse cheek as I knead my fingers into the hot, solid, _deliberate_ realness of him, and the talking mirror scrapes along his opposite hip.

"Siri-" Harry pants, breath hot and damp against my ear as he warns me, begs me, forgets the endless, threatening question just behind _there_. I bite his shoulder and my name turns into a ragged gasp and a whine so deep in his chest I can feel it against my thundering heart, and oh Merlin I'm not going to last long either!

"Don't-" I growl it into his ear, thrusting home each word with hips and tongue, "Say. That. Here!" He gasps, shivering on the edge of orgasm as he casts a wild glance back at the stone archway, and the sound that rips out of him then is closer to a sob than any sound I've ever heard him make.

"Not here," he grunts, eyes wide, cheeks flaming scarlet. "Not here --"

And then he's awake and we're back in that crap-filled muggle room, and he's half-lunging from his sliver of a bed with a cry on his lips that just barely _isn't_ my name.

And I'm naked, aching, freezing, and hard against the barrier. The cold twists my nipples into icy pebbles, pain of it inching me closer to/ holding me back from that edge he'd driven me to. His eyes scrape the glass, and _don't fucking SEE me_. The loss is like a kick to the gut for me, but the sound he makes then is worse.

I'm scramble across the reflected room, shove the reflected boy back so hard the bedsprings yowl and I'm on him, and he's humping back, all clutching fingers and gripping knees and panting, gulping bleats and Prongs' broken speaking mirror's cutting/ burning/ freezing my fingers as my bollocks coil up tight and I pant/ gasp/ growl/ snarl into his ear, into the fractured glass, into this fucked-up thing that's happening between us.

"Say it, Harry! Say it NOW!"

And he does.

And the sound -- barely a whisper ground out between his teeth, a gulp, a sob with sibilant ends -- the sound of that one word which means ME, is all it takes for both of us. He comes so hard I wonder if he'll die. I come so hard I think I might come back to life.

But no. This miracle is smaller, fiercer, madder than that. Harry's reflection puts his arms around me, presses his damp, heated lips beneath my ear, and whispers, "Sirius...Love you..."

And then he's asleep again.  
But this time he isn't letting go.

~*~

 

It doesn't happen again the next night. We're both too jumpy for that. I don't touch Harry's reflection, Harry doesn't touch his mirror, neither of us whispers a single breath that could sound like a name. There's too much thinking to do. Too much feeling to recover from. Too many what-if's to be sorted through, and at least I've the cheap, too-sweet burn of Fat Shite's reflected brandy to help grease my meditations. Harry, poor lad, has only his book.

He doesn't write in front of the mirror this time, nor does he leave the book there when he sleeps. Nor do I look for it.

He doesn't dream that night either, and both of us wake relieved.

Until, upon waking up and rolling out of bed, Harry's foot knocks over the crystal snifter that I'd set on the floor on _my_ side of the mirror before going to sleep last night. He freezes, eyes wide as the snifter rolls across the floor in a wobbly arc, and fetches up against his wardrobe.

"Sirius?" His voice is thin and wary. "What's… how did...?"

"I don't know." But he doesn't hear me. I'm not even sure he sees me, though his eyes know just where to look. I snatch the damned journal book out from under his reflection's too-thin mattress and slam it down on the desk. He's got one of those strange, featherless pens there, but I ignore it, digging about in the desk drawers for ink and a proper quill. It has to work. He has to see it if I write to him -- he simply has to!

He's sitting there when I return, book open, eyes fierce, quill dripping a full-stop at the end of his first crooked scrawl of a question. _How did that get in here?_

Quill in hand, I reach over his reflection's shoulder and tell him, taking deep delight in watching my words form up underneath his, spooling out in _my_ handwriting, despite the awkward angle. He takes a moment to puzzle out the backward script, then his brows knit and he shakes his head. "That's impossible."

_.wonk I_

"Move something else," he says, and behind his glasses, his eyes are narrowing, growing hard. I remember that business with the diary and the basilisk in his second form and lean in to write.

He shakes his head. "No, **I** put the book on the desk."

_.kcolliP .tsrif ereht ti tup I_

And that makes him laugh, though we both know he isn't convinced. "All right then, if you made me put the book on the desk, you can make me do something else." And he puts the quill down, and he folds his arms across his skinny, naked chest. His eyes hold equal measures of threat and dare, and I'm suddenly breathless. I'd been desperate to see that lively a look in his dull, sunken eyes -- praying for it all these long weeks and never realizing.

And now I've got that spark, now his eyes are alive, and I've heard his laugh. Now I've some proof my Harry's still alive in there, I will do anything -- _anything_ \-- to keep it so. To keep him alive in there however I can.

And with that realization, I remember the other night. Looking past the shock and guilt at my own reactions, I give a thought to Harry's; how hungry he was, how desperate when he kissed me, how fierce when he clung, how free when he came. And then I think about how not one single person but me has really touched him since he came here to Little Hell. Nothing beyond a clap to the shoulder or a handshake from whatever Order came to check on him, and yes, it was mostly because he wouldn't let them close, I realize, but still... a boy can still starve for touch, can't he?

Counting his ribs and the fragile hope unfurling in his green, green eyes, I think he has been.

I reach around his reflection, run the velvety quill along the underside of his jaw, then down the long, arched column of his throat. He starts to tremble. So do I. His tiny, rosy nipple is hard and puckered already when I drag the feather across it, and no longer remotely unconvinced, Harry pins his bottom lip between his teeth to block in a groan. Fascinated, I run the quill over his nipple again, watching the pink, urgent flesh part the feather's barbs like a fan. A breath stutters out of him, and his head tips back. His reflection's head rests solid and hot on my shoulder as Harry reaches one hand into his pants to take his straining erection in hand.

"That's it, Harry," I press my lips to his reflection's ear, running my palm from his shoulder to his flexing elbow and back up again. "That's it, I'm here. I'm with you, I'm right here..."

He moans, but I can't tell if he's heard me, or is just chasing his own bliss now. I'd speak into the talking mirror if he had his own in hand, but I can see that bit of magic glinting in the twist of his sheets. So instead, I grab his reflection's working wrist, yank it away, and lean over him to scratch a sidelong order into his book.

He sees it, and somehow he digs up the willpower from his sixteen year old libido to place both hands on the desk -- palms down, just as I'd asked. I lick at a pearl of sweat that gathers at his reflection's temple, and curl my own hand around his cock. He gives a yelp and surges up into my grip, and I could come right there -- just from the knowledge that Harry's feeling my touch. He's reacting to me, he's biting his lip and trembling and sweating and it's because of what **I** am doing to his reflection... to HIM. And by Godric's balls, it makes me feel alive! I press my index finger down along the straining ridge of Harry's cock and nudge his balls with each downward stroke. The heel of my hand tugs his foreskin back and forth over his scarlet cockhead and his precome streaks the inside of my wrist like hot, sticky silk.

Four strokes. He arches up high, fingernails scoring his desktop, eyes and lips wide, and Merlin, how I want to thrust my tongue inside that panting mouth! Instead I scratch the quill across the page, breaking the nib at the end of the fourth letter.

He reads it.

He blinks.

And he obeys, shouting my name as ropes of his come sling up along my arm, across his belly, the desk. And I'm coming too, my cock untouched and surging with release, with freedom, with _life_! I groan his name as the shockwaves subside, and like an echo, hear mine on his lips again.

"You're here, oh god you're here," he whispers, eyes clenched tight. "You're real, you're not dead, I'm not dreaming, oh Sirius-"

"Boy!" The door shudders, and we both jump. "Who are you talking to? What's going on in there?"

"Nothing, Uncle Vernon," Harry cries, scrambling from the desk. The snifter crunches under his foot, and he staggers with a grimace. "I was talking to Hedwig," he adds through clenched teeth, picking a large shard from his heel and wadding a shirt against the wound.

"Well stop it!" The door bucks again, but doesn't open. Harry takes the warning though, and wriggles quickly into fresh pants and trousers. "And since you're bloody well up," Fat Shite the Elder grumbles on, "you can stop thundering about up here, robbing decent, hardworking people of their rest, and go get the bloody breakfast started!"

"Tell him I want extra sausages, Dad!" Fat Shite the Younger bawls from down the hallway.

"I will, Uncle Vernon," Harry says, nudging the broken snifter further under the desk as the locks begin to wrench open. Merlin knows what he'll have to say when the damned thing's missed. I grimace at the thought as he leaves my sight.

"What's that, Boy?" Fat Shite snarls.

"It's blood, Uncle Vernon. I cut my foot when I fell over."

"Blood!" Horseface squeals, "On my nice carpets! Get off, get off! Go and get a plaster on, you clumsy idiot! And bring the cleanser when you come back!"

And just like that, _familia atrocis_ takes the buzz off a mind-blowing morning wank. Damn them all to a hell without telly. Together.

Ah well. At least I can spell the reflection of the broken snifter back together now I've got Snape's wand, and who knows, maybe it'll work on the real one as well… I bend to fetch it out from under the desk, then stop as the glint of blood on the glass catches my eye. The big shard, curved like a bell, scarlet swirling through the ghost of last night's brandy.

I don't know what I'm doing. I'm making this up. All of it. The blood on the glass, Harry's spunk on my arm, my own running down my leg, the breathless press and glide of that clear razor through my sticky palm. And then all four savage elements are sliding together across my skin, and oh Merlin, I don't know what I'm doing. I've a handful of the most potent magic I've ever touched in my life OR death, and I'm as tempted to claw it across my face like a Red Indian's warpaint as to scrawl it like fingerpaints across the barrier that won't stop holding Harry and me apart.

I don't know what I'm doing. Except maybe I do on some level, because I find I've put Snape's wand aside, and have come up with Jamie's shattered talking mirror. Poor thing. My death wasn't its fault, but it's paid the price, hasn't it?

Haven't we all?

I whisper the mending charm as I turn its shattered face down into the thick pool of pearl and garnet in my hand, and… there's a shock and a shiver. There's a grind and a groan. And when I turn the talking mirror back over, there's my own face staring back from its unclouded surface.

Hello there, you handsome dog.

I bark a laugh and fling myself back across the tousled bed. I may not know what I'm doing, but by Godric's hairy armpits, it seems like I'm doing it right!

~*~

Of course Voldemort doesn't stay away for long. A stroppy, skinny 16 year old kid pitches him out on his ear for the first time ever, and doesn't seem to break a sweat over it? What Dark Lord could stand for that kind of an insult?

So the next night, he's back, and neither of us are surprised at it. Even Harry's nightmare twitch and bedsheet struggles seem wearily resigned. The only thing with any weight to it is the same thing as before; my name, clamped fast in his dreaming teeth. My name, my key, my secret entrance -- and despite his distrust as of that morning, Harry, I am relieved to find, hasn't changed the locks.

It's as before -- the arch, my death, the too-real, too-pushy figure trying to sort out the native topography, to force reaction and response from everything he sees. I don't look too closely. I don't have to. Harry knows where the bastard is just as readily as he sees me.

Voldemort, on the other hand can't see me at all. I test this fairly extensively, much to Harry's consternation. Me and Snape's wand make seem to weigh a bit more here in Harry's dreaming than Voldemort's sneaky dream-sending does. And yeah, that pisses him off. And yeah, he gets mean, and since he can't target me, he takes it out on my Godson. Any fool could see how that escalation's going to go, but him being a genocidal maniac, perhaps we can forgive him.

Like hell.

The second Very Important Thing we learn that night is that the worst nightmare grip that bastard can get on Harry, the most solid, crushing hold he can manage, still can't hold up to an _enervate_ cast from inside Harry's mind. Because once Harry wakes up, both Voldemort and I are sent flying.

It's a moment of pure joy to watch Harry eyes glitter with relief and joy as he sits up in that squeaky, crappy little bed, awake and gasping, and grinning because _finally_ he's got a real way out of the Dead Lord's clutches. He gropes for his talking mirror, whispering startled jubilation across the glass and the back of my neck, and I'm turning toward his reflection, ready to tackle him down in triumph.

And then he freezes. Gives a wince and a gasp. Presses his hand to his forehead.

And then we learn another Important Thing; Voldemort can hurt Harry just as much when he's awake. And about that, there is still absolutely nothing I can do.

But of course I have to try. I hold his reflection all night, wind myself about him, rock us both back and forth in desperate search of some shred of comfort. I wipe the sweat and tears from his streaming eyes, and I whisper to Jamie's mirror until I'm hoarse and half-dazed with repeating myself. And I curse Voldemort's name with every beat of my Godson's racing heart, with every choked-back whimper he locks behind his clenched teeth, with every frantic clutch of his fingers into the sheets when the pain rocks through him like _cruciatus_.

That's a lot of curses, but it's nowhere near enough.

Toward dawn the attack recedes, and Harry falls asleep at last. His face is welted from his clawing, and I suspect he's cracked a tooth as well. He doesn't even twitch when Horseface comes to the door to find out why he isn't fixing their breakfast. She, at least, puts her head in to see that he's still alive, but one look at his face, hollowed and smudged with exhaustion, and milk-pale but for that glaring scar, and she backs out again.

For a moment I think she'll go and get Figg, warn her something's happened. Then I hear her rattling pans in the kitchen and cooing to Fat Shite the Younger about breakfast coming soon. Useless bloody cow. Fine then. Up to me it'll be.

I drag myself to the window, throw it open. I release Hedwig's reflection, and though she doesn't precisely see me in her reflected world, the clever bird has the sense to go for help when the way's made clear. But the real owl's still locked in, the real window still closed, and I've no patience to wait about for the real world to catch up with my own. Harry said yesterday that he meant to turn her loose for a bit of flying today -- nonchalant as if we'd both forgot the date, or just why an owl might need a bit of freedom for deliveries in the coming night.

But he's wrecked, my Harry, and no owl could bring him what he needs right now. I've a new wand, however, which I expect will be rather more useful.

* * *

In retrospect, casting the _Morsmordre_ right there in Harry's reflected bedroom might have made rather a bigger statement than I'd intended. It's just as that horrid green shape leaps out of my stolen wand that I start thinking of all the ways that it could backfire. Death Eaters feeling the ghostly echoes, the Ministry somehow catching sight of it before the Order does, Dumbledore's wards having more bite than bark... all equally possible. But I want Harry out of this Muggle pit. I want the Order there right smartly, and much as it makes my stomach twist to look at it, the Dark Mark, even in reverse, will bring them.

And of course it does. They apparate into the living room before the sparks have even faded. Horseface gets off one piercing shriek downstairs, something shatters, Fat Shite the Younger shouts for his Da, then shuts up. I like to imagine him cowering from a twisted shirt collar at the end of Kingsley's fist, but that's probably just a fantasy.

They take one look at Harry -- who pulls together enough to squint when Moody, Tonks, Remus and Vance plow into his room -- and they can't get him away fast enough.

We're in Grimmauld Place by dinnertime. Mixed blessing, of course, trading Harry's prison for mine, but after last night, I trust the wards that five hundred years of Blacks have soaked into this old place's foundations more than I do the meager protection offered by Horseface's blood.

And anyway -- I can leave Grimmauld Place now, can't I? I can go wherever Harry and his reflection do, and neither order nor Order can stay me.

They go over Harry with a fine-toothed comb -- equal parts clucking concern at how thin, worn, and exhausted he looks, and furious worry at how the wards could have been set off so close to him while he knew nothing about it. I think about hanging close and listening -- there's a mirror beside the kitchen door, and my presence seems to make its natural personality quiet and sluggish. But Harry's still tired and spooky enough to be easily distracted, and after the second time Moody leaps around, wand at the ready because Harry started at a glimpse of me, I figure I'd better give them some space.

I amuse myself by slipping into my mother's portrait and freezing her stiff while one by one, the members of the Order try and sort out what happened. Eventually they decide that it must have been Voldemort's attack on him that triggered the wards. Either that, or they decide that Molly's ire is not worth pressing any farther when there's clearly no more information Harry can give them. Shortly after Dumbledore asks Harry if there's anything more to tell, they finally let the boy drift off to bed.

I, meanwhile, have learned to my delight, that the subject of a wizarding portrait can no more see me in their world than Voldemort could in Harry's dreaming. Dear old Mum's bug-eyed and blue-lipped before I'm tired of this new game. So when the kitchen door opens at last, there I stand, with my fingers wrapped around a throat I'd dreamed of throttling lo, these past twenty years as Harry and Remus slip past, quiet as churchmice, and unaware that the Harpy can't make a sound above a gurgle.

"You'll be all right tonight, Harry?" I hear Remus whisper as the stairs begin to creak. And Harry must have nodded, because Remus' voice goes all golden-warm with approval, and just hearing it makes my heart lurch with envy and longing. "Good lad. Ron will be right there with you, and I'm just across the hall, so don't hesitate to-"

"I'll be all right." Harry cuts him off, and then the stairs creaked again. One door closes, then another, and for a moment, for a long and aching moment, I stand in that shrouded painting with my mother's throat in my hands and I wonder if I'll be given a choice.

But my answer comes almost at once -- the sudden, portkey-pulling behind my bollocks, the way the whole world wobbles and runs with the silent sound of my name being smeared like spackle across the cracks in Harry's mind.

_Sirius where are you Sirius come back to me Sirius come find me Sirius where are-_

And what can I do but go?

Because he calls my name to keep himself safe. Because his essence is mingled with mine now, and the primal magic it's wrought is still thrumming inside the both of us. Because if I'm not given a choice in all of this, well Harry's not given one either, is he? And because no matter how much I might have missed Moony, there's still a part of me that insists that Harry shouldn't have to be alone in this dark old house.

Especially not on his birthday.

~*~

It's harder for us at Grimmauld. The Order's always watching Harry. If he stares too long into a mirror, then other people start asking what he's seeing there, start trying to catch a glimpse of it themselves, start wondering why the mirrors in his rooms go slowly silent and unresponsive like muggle mirrors do. And between Snape, who seems to have a feeling for where his wand's reflection is lurking, and that damned eye of Moody's, I spend a lot of time being very still amongst the reflected furniture.

The journal proves tough to use as well -- nobody wants to leave Harry alone for long enough that he can write in it. We both know without even wondering that there isn't a single Order member who won't snoop if they find it. Even Hermione would justify it in light of the scare that got Harry out of Little Whinging this summer. His every moment is scrutinized, and we both know it.

So I put the days to use on my own. One thing Polaris Black did manage to do with his money was to assemble a reasonably good library, and I don't mean adventure novels or robe-rippers. I know the ideas that have been nibbling at me must be in here -- somewhere between basic magical theory and blood magic so black just owning a book that describes it is illegal. Semiotic, symbiotic, gestalt principles of similarity and sympathy and power. Blood. Semen. Names. Yin. Yang. Dao. Mirrors. Reflections. Refractions. Fractal geometry athwart diabolism, dadaism, and quantum theory. Numerology and neuropathology and nonsense rhymes of sacred madmen who dream of lost things and find the ancient names to speak once more aloud. The name of a thing, like the reflection of a thing, is not the thing itself, and yet, with enough threads of connection, could a bridge not be built from one to the other?

If a spider can creep along a single thread from place to place, then can a ghost be all that much heavier? The question keeps me out of sight, and out of trouble.

Day by day, Harry lets his friends begin to cheer him up, and day by day I work out exactly what it is I've been doing/he's been doing/we've been doing to each other. Night by night, we keep each other sane, he and I -- sane and solid and slick and sweaty and aching and needing and wanting and wanting and wanting and _taking_. Until we're both so exhausted, sated and intertwined that the dreams can't get in between us. Only the daylight can do that.

I say nothing to Harry about what I'm doing. I don't want to offer him hope when there might be none. And he doesn't tell me what he's doing with his days either. Not that I think he's got anything to hide -- he's a kid, after all, and with other kids in the house he's at last begun to act the part. Exploding Snap and Chocolate Frogs, spying and giggling after they've been banished upstairs, water fights in the kitchen when Molly's set them to doing the dishes of an evening. It does my heart good to see him acting like that, but... and there's always a but with Harry, isn't there? But there's always that trace of a shadow lurking in his eyes, no matter how carefree he may seem. There's always something held back. Some cost he can't help calculating along with pip cards and homework points and soapy splashes.

And in a way, it makes me feel a bit less grotesque about what we do in the shelter of his dreaming. About taking what I need from him in kisses and gasps and groping, callused palms stroking on urgently swollen flesh, about giving him what he needs from me in hands and teeth, and a heat and a slide and a grip too hard, too good, too _real_ to be wishful thinking.

Godfather is a word, but Harry -- Harry's a _name_, and when it bursts across my tongue with the bright, hot taste of his seed, and when it skitters through my heart with the quivering, tight embrace he locks me in, that _name_ has more power over me than even my own.

Although there is just as much gravity, often, in the absence of my name from certain other lips.

The feel of my name in a werewolf's restless dreams is almost, _almost_ enough to distract me when it drifts through the house in the dead, dark hours after midnight, when Harry's dreamself dozes sated and not-quite debauched in my arms and we are all little more than a clutch of restless shadows.

Although, although, and although.

One afternoon, while the Weasleys haul the kids off to Diagon Alley, while Moody, Tonks, and Shacklebolt have Auror business, and Snivelly's off in his Hogwarts hole, while Dung is sniffing after his latest score, and the house lies silent but for the raspy breath of my mother's half-throttled portrait, and the marching tick of the mantle clock in the entry hall, and the moon's full face is a scant eighteen hours away, I dare his room.

Just to see. Just to know.

The afternoon light falls like ashes through the curtains, grey like summer always is in London. Grey as despair, as boredom, as hidebound tradition that creeps like dust into your pores with every breath and ossifies every thought you ever had of freedom. Grey as the soft hair at his temples -- paler than I remember it being before I left him. Before I died. Grey as the fragile skin by his mouth and eyes, where even in sleep the sadness lingers. Grey as my golden Moony never used to be.

And it occurs to me that I've made him like this. Hardworn, weary, so still in his sleep that he almost seems hopeless. Was I always so hard on him, I wonder? Grinding his life away in reckless episodes that cost him more in worry than the moon ever did in pain? Or is it just that I can't seem to stop leaving him?

For Azkaban. For death. For Harry.

I sigh, sit on the reflection of Moony's bed, and trail my fingers through that too-silver hair. His reflection doesn't stir, but the grey light manages to find a flicker of gold where his eyelashes brush his cheek. I freeze, wondering/dreading/hoping I'll see his reflection's eyes open, see that amber gaze pull me out of the shadows the way the emerald has learned to do.

But he only sighs, and after a moment I suppose the glitter was probably tears anyhow.

Remus has a journal as well, but when I snoop -- and why should I flinch from reading it now when I did so all through school, and after? -- I find it's full of notes on his transformations. Symptoms timed and described with clinical detachment, so that if it weren't his handwriting, I'd think they were done up by a machine. Snape's bidding, I suppose. I can just hear him sneering 'I don't care one whit about the damned creature's _feelings_! Don't waste my time with maudlin claptrap!'

Snape never cared for anyone's feelings but his own. And people wonder why I hate him. Myself, I wonder why more people don't.

But I don't want to think about Snape. Not now. Not when my Moony's asleep just there, _just there_, so close to the mirrorwall that my ghost-breath clouds in the air. So close that I could reach over his reflection and lay my hand on his knee, if not for that barrier... Only he isn't my Moony anymore, is he? For I've taken my naming from younger lips than his now, and my lead lies in a smaller, smoother hand.

"And so I've left you again, haven't I, mate?" I ask him, unsurprised when he has no answer for me.

Then a sudden clatter of footsteps on the stairs startles me away from the glass. The door opens, and from my safe vantage, I wince to see Harry on the threshold, face flushed and eyes angry as he strides uninvited into Remus' bedroom. I hadn't heard them come home, and I'm pretty sure Harry will spot me if I try and slip away. So I stay quiet as Remus sits up on the bed, blinking and curious.

"Harry," he says as the boy closes the door behind him. "What's wrong?"

"Charlie Weasley firecalled," Harry says, leaning against the door, as if to block it. "He said to tell you that he's running late, but he'll be here in time for the moonrise."

Moonrise?

"Oh," Remus says, scrubbing at his face. "Thank you for telling me."

"Why is he coming here?" Harry blurts. "Why should he come for the full moon? Why now?"

"Charlie has offered to stay with me during the change tonight," he says, turning to put his bare feet onto the floor. I bite back the curl that wants to twist my lip. Harry doesn't. "Snape's made some alterations to the potion," Remus tries to explain, "things to make the change easier. Charlie's to make notes and-"

"Why has he been owling you?" Remus blinks, and Harry's eyes flash a cruel triumph. "Ron said Charlie's been owling you all summer."

"Harry, they're only letters-"

"They're every bloody week!" Harry cuts through the dissembling with a growl. "He's writing you _letters_ every bloody week, and you're _letting_ him! I'm not stupid, you know, I know what you're doing. You're forgetting him. You're letting him go!"

And by Godric's beard, I'd run from this room if I could. Because I do not want to hear this -- do not want to be trapped with the answers my own heart can't help making, like, _What choice does he have -- it was me that let him go first._ If I were on four paws, I'd hide beneath the bed and whine.

Remus though, rises up to Harry's youthful ire, raking back his slivered hair with frustrated fingers. "What would you have me do, Harry? Shower myself with ashes? Hobble around Hogsmeade wringing my hands and wailing my loss? Check myself into a monastery and change my name to Abelard? Sirius Black meant more to me than anyone I have ever known, but he is GONE!"

_I'm not._

"He's not-"

"Yes, Harry." Moony's voice is as grey as his hair, as his room, as the grimy London sky through the shuttered windows. "Yes he is. I wish he weren't too, but he's gone, and I've done all the grieving I can for him. Now I have to either go on with my life, or else I have to just give up and die."

"You could wait." Harry's lips are pressed tight, jaw clenched hard, as though to stop it wobbling.

"I did wait. Twelve years of Azkaban, I waited, even though I thought him a murderer at the time. I waited half my life to have what I did of him, Harry," he laughs, shaking his head. "You cannot be asking me to try to outwait death now."

"I'd wait," Remus doesn't reply, but turns toward the window so Harry won't see what's in his eyes -- that's telling enough. "I would!" the kid pushes off the door, insisting. "I reckon I'd wait forever, if I loved someone that much. And I wouldn't forget him for the first-"

"I am not," Remus places the words like careful stones across Harry's babble, "ever going to forget him."

Harry, sensing at last that he's out of bounds, hesitates. "But Charlie-"

"Is Charlie. And he's completely different to Sirius, and he always will be." Then he brushes his forelock from his weary eyes and he conjures a smile for Harry. And my heart gives a twist in my breast to see how hard he works to do it. "Anyway, it could all go nowhere, couldn't it? Seeing as how the whole affair's nothing more than a few friendly letters as of right now. And our first date's going to consist of me transforming into a dangerous creature while he takes notes and keeps his wand at the ready in case I try to tear his throat out."

And Harry has the grace to laugh at that. "Yeah, well Charlie fancies dangerous creatures," he allows, then he gets that canny look I'm sure his professors have come to fear. "Is that why you're letting him..."

"Letting him?" Remus politely refuses to fill the silence with any of the first six insulting things I think of. Harry doesn't seem to realize it's a kindness though, and he flushes darkly.

"Letting him like you," he mutters.

I don't know how Remus manages not to laugh. "Well," he says after a thoughtful moment, "you know Harry, not many people consider me a catch unless they're after the bounty my pelt would bring. It's not as though I can be terribly choosey." But he sees how those words darken Harry's glower, and thank Merlin he stops it before I have to start shouting myself. "But Charlie seems to like me, and I like him. He's a smart, capable, good-looking fellow, and I'm flattered by his attentions."

"But you don't love him?"

"I barely know him!" Remus laughs, rising from the bed. His reflection brushes my shoulder as he pads barefoot to Harry's side. "No, Harry, I don't love him -- not yet. But I think I could do, if..." he doesn't bother to fill them in, the dozens of hundreds of ifs that rush up to that dangling possibility. He doesn't have to. We all think of the same one straight out of the queue.

"You're not going to die, Remus." The quiet ferocity in Harry's voice is more than any sane man would dare. This is the furious will that's held the Dark Lord at bay, and leashed me to his side when oblivion should rightfully have owned me. This is Harry's steel.

But Moony gives a sad laugh, and shakes his head. "Yes I am, Harry. Sooner if the war goes badly, a little later if we win it, but despite what Voldemort wants to believe, dying is not optional." He folds his arms across his chest and leans on the doorframe. At one time I'd have thought it looked a casual slouch, but this close to the full moon, I recognize its true purpose; support for a man too weary to stand alone.

"Harry, you must face facts," he says. "This curse is hard on me. Each moon takes years off my life, even with Snape's potion easing the transformations. I'm still young as wizards go, but werewolves rarely live past sixty, and they generally aren't welcome in nursing hospices if they do." He smiles at his feeble joke, but he's the only one. Harry looks positively murderous, and if I could touch him, I know I'd be trying to shake those horribly true words off Remus' lips. "I might not survive this war," Remus says gently, "but if I do... I have to begin thinking of the future. Who will want to take care of me?"

Harry doesn't answer. He bites his lip, glowering for a moment before shaking his head, tearing open the door, and storming off down the hallway. My heart breaks just a little more to realize that Harry knows better than to volunteer.

~*~

Harry's footsteps recede down the hall, startling echoes ever fainter, until the bathroom door cuts them off with a slam. He wants to talk to me, of course. I can feel the tugging already, even as the pipes in the wall begin to groan and tap, but his gravity's not nearly so inexorable when he's awake. I can hold out for a little while more.

There's something I have to do. Harry will just have to understand.

Remus shuffles back across the room to his bed, sitting with slow, careful movements. I'm sure if I felt that tired, I'd simply flop. But Moony never just falls, does he? Even failure and retreat are deliberate with him -- controlled, balanced, as though he can actually _see_ that point of no return the rest of us like to pretend we don't have. He respects his.

Which might be why he's still alive after the rest of us Marauders are dead... or might as well be.

I slip out of the curtains and sit beside Remus on his reflected bed. Our knees touch firmly, but I have no reason to hope that Moony can feel it. He's not Harry. He's not got the strength to fuel that half-mad blinding faith the kid does. And maybe he used to do, before Azkaban, before Godric's Hollow, before the Veil, but each one's cost him. Each time he's survived to walk away, it's cost him a little bit more of his ability to just _believe_, to just close his eyes and step out into the void. To trust in impossible things.

And I, as one of those impossible things, haven't the heart to blame him. Nor do I have any reason left not to tell him everything -- everything I never did back when my heart beat inside my chest, back when I was going to live forever.

Like the fact that I actually do understand. That I don't want him to die still waiting for me, that he has to live now, and he has to be loved, and damn it, he _deserves_ to be loved by someone who isn't so bloody selfish. He deserves to be loved by someone who will live for him. He deserves to be happy if there's any way he possibly can, and maybe by this last leaving, I'll have given him a chance at that.

If he could hear me say it, he'd turn the whole thing around, have me eating my words, and rolling about in the bloody undeserved luxury of a man who would give me anything, whether I asked for it or not. Because Remus always did have a way of making me take what he had to give, even when I knew he didn't have it to spare.

It's strange, a little bit, being the one he can't say no to now. It hurts. And it feels completely right. I hate it, but something in me needs to do it.

I also tell Remus that if Charlie Weasley hurts him, if he lies, or he fucks about, or he ever makes my Moody sad, I bloody well _will_ find a way to make that freckled little brat wish for the mercy of the veil with every ginger hair on his hide. Remus doesn't hear that either, but it doesn't matter -- that part is a promise between me and the fucked up universe that's seen me to this end. I _know_ I can find a way to keep it, no matter who's witnessed the oath.

Oaths need more than words though. Goodbyes do too.

I lean across Remus' reflection, interrupt his slouch with a kiss. His lips part under mine, and for a moment my heart gives a surge of joy. In the breath-held moment of wild hope, I'm ready to chew up and choke down every one of my words if he'll only _look_ at me...

But no. Remus only gives a weary sigh. Then he's pulling out of my hands to flop back onto his bed, one arm crooked over his eyes to hide from that awful, grey light, and I have to go. Because I've never seen him cry, my Moony, and if I see it now, nothing in the world will stop me running mad.

Coward. Yeah. You don't have to say.

~*~

"What's going to happen when I go back?" Harry asks, water steaming around his naked shoulders. "Will you be there too? Can you?"

I don't see why I wouldn't. Harry's proven already that he's the anchor that's keeping me in place. Mind, at this point I don't actually resent it, but still. I followed him from Hogwarts to Little Whinging to Grimmauld Place, so going back to Hogwarts oughtn't to be a problem.

He wrings his flannel between bloodless fingers, looking unconvinced by my surety. "Only there aren't any mirrors in the dorm rooms, you see?" he explains, "Just in the bathrooms, and those doors don't lock except for the prefect's bath, and I can't get in there unless Hermione or Ron lets me in and I'm sure they wouldn't leave me alone in there, especially if I asked them to."

All right, so _that_ part of 'being there too' might suffer a bit of a crimp. I pace a tour of the floor, the tile chilling under my bare feet as I draw near the barrier pane. It is rimed with thick frost on my side, so I score a message with the tip of Snape's wand. "Smaerd," the letters form in reverse on the steamy side that faces Harry.

He shakes his head as he reads. "Can't. I have to start occlumency lessons again," he says as though announcing his coming death. "With Snape. Dumbledore insisted."

I scratch a two-word suggestion into the frost, and win a startled laugh at least.

"Dumbledore's right though," Harry sighs, scrubbing at his face with the cloth until his cheeks glow, "even with you helping me, I can't _keep_ Voldemort from getting in. He's just too strong. And I won't be able to keep Snape out either. He'll find out about you, and then he'll-"

I scratch on the frost again, but Harry's busy winding himself up, and hasn't noticed. I slosh a fistful of bathwater into Harry's reflection's face, and tap the glass sharply.

"What book?" he coughs, wiping his streaming eyes, "my journal? We can't use that! What if someone looks in it? They'll think I've gone mad!"

No, not that book, damn it. The one I've taken from the library and stashed under his pillow in the room he shares with Ron Weasley. The one written by the first dark wizard to give Legilimency a name, or to imagine what it might take to block it. The one Snivellus should have put into Harry's hands from the first lesson, only most likely he'd only ever _heard_ about the damn thing. And wouldn't he just give birth to a live, flopping mackerel if he realized had been in the library at Grimmauld Place all along, and he never knew?

Harry squints to read the mirror, and his lips thin as he puzzles out the reversed letters. "You think me reading a bloody book about it will help? This is SNAPE we're talking about. I already know I don't understand a bloody thing about it, and he never explains anything."

I scratch the girl's name in the frost, and that, at least, he gives a bit more consideration. "All right, I suppose there's no reason she and Ron shouldn't learn about it as well. I'll show her the book and see what she makes of it. But what if that isn't enough?" The doubt stands plain in his eyes. "Reading about occlumency can't be the same as doing it -- what if I still can't?"

Which, in itself, is pure bollocks. Prongs, and me never had anything but books to tell us how to become animagi, and Harry's no less clever than his dad, no matter what Snivellus might want him to believe. And with Hermione and Ron on his side, Harry ought to be able to make even shorter work of occlumency than we did of animagery.

Only there's still that damned scar, isn't there -- that jagged mark Voldemort left behind him that just queers the whole equation. Because that bastard stole Harry's blood, and that gives him more than just a casual link to the kid. Because this is Voldemort, and nothing with him can _ever_ be easy.

But I've made a lifetime out of tricky, haven't I? Spent all my living days being a sneaky bastard who gets around the rules, the guards, the bars, and the laws. So of course I have a plan.

It's not a precisely _sane_ plan -- based more in hunch and symbolism and raw semiotic theory than in any sort of established practice I could point to, but, well, we've already established the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. Doesn't stop me doing it though, especially with my Harry's brain fighting a two-front war between Voldemort and Snape. Kid needs a break.

And I think I just might know the best break for him.

"Od ew gniht tsrif," I scratch across the glass, "desirE dnif si."


	3. Chapter 3

He stops in the hallway, lets the echoes of his footfalls outstrip us. "Sirius," he says, so low even the cobwebs lean to hear, "I'm scared."

To tell the truth, I am too. There's about a hundred unknown quantities at work here. A thousand angles we two just can't cover. A million ways this prank could backfire.

If I could speak to him just now, I'd laugh too loudly, give his shoulder a shove and say something like -- hey now, it's us against Snape! He'll never know what hit him! But however much I'd like to bluster and brag us both back to a state of well-deserved cockiness, I hold my tongue. We can't afford banter now. It's too much work, me riding pillion on Harry's mind when he's fully awake; awkward, uncomfortable, exhausting, and that's just making it from Gryffindor tower to Snape's chilly black spider-hole. Throw talking into the mix, and we'll make the thestral's breakfast of it for sure.

When Harry draws me into his dreaming, I am more real than ever -- able to offer support and comfort, to speak and be heard, to touch and be touched. Awake, though, Harry's mind creates no dreamself. I am here alone with his racing thoughts, and unless he spends half an hour breathing funny with his eyes closed, he's unable to hear me, or to sense anything more of me than a vague alien presence inside his mind. A dead spot, he says, which makes me feel nice, I can tell you. I'm less than a ghost here when he's awake, less than a reflection -- I have no shadow, I leave no footprints. Thoughts race through me and don't even tickle. Memories are more solid than I and my pockets full of stolen sticks and sneaky tricks are.

We both hate it. We decided that the very first time we tried it. But neither one of us could think of a way around it.

He takes a deep breath, releases a shiver that runs out to the tips of his fingers. I'd hug him if I could. For a moment I focus hard on what I remember that feeling like -- his ribs against my arms, his breath damp against my throat, his hair tickling my nose. Makes me feel better, even if he gets nothing from it.

Then Harry relaxes forcibly, head coming up, shoulders squaring to the dungeon's draft. He smiles just a little bit and doesn't seem even remotely like his dad to me. "All right," he says, striding to Snape's office door. "Let's get it over with."

"Potter," The name drips off Snape's lips and almost sizzles in the cold silence of the room. "You're late."

He's early, actually, but since when would that matter to Snape?

"Sorry, sir," Harry says, closing the door and shaking his wand into his hand and getting a firm grip on his temper. He doesn't bother to sound remorseful -- Snape would only find something else to attack him on if he did.

My passive vantage begins to cloud over as Harry concentrates on his touchstone -- on the _something_ he's used to anchor his occlumency all summer long; the mantra-like image of me going backward through the veil, over and over and over again. The cold, grey room firms up out of the thoughtstuff around me, taut and groaning with shadows. The arch scrapes out of the gloom, and I can't help flinching. And then there's me, frozen in a backward arch that ought to be impossible, limned in scarlet light and laughing like a man who doesn't know he's about to die.

My heart speeds up, and I clench my fingers tight about my stolen wand as the scene jumps to life. Snape's spiteful bitching drowns under the sudden sound of my name, slithering around the hard-angled room in the Chorus's fractured voice. The clinging veil reaches out, surrounds the falling idiot, swallows him and his reckless pride whole without so much as a burp. I manage a breath, but only one. Only the lack of a door keeps me from bolting from that starkly remembered room.

"Steady on, Padfoot," I tell myself, sliding my back against the far wall, and angling to put the morbid scene out of sight, "Over and done with. Not real. Not now. Harry knows his part, now you do yours. Just like you've practiced it..."

Then the spell hits, rocking Harry's touchstone like an earthquake, and all I can do is hold on and wait for the bastard to break through. It takes longer than Harry told me to expect -- the book's archaic theory and our weeks of practice have done him that much good, at least. Still, I can tell from Harry's breathless, straining surprise that he never expected to make it this long against the greasy bastard.

But we'd planned for Snape to get in. The whole prank hinges on it, and so I make sure I'm ready. At the first sign of a crack, the first grinding split, the first glimmer of dust, I'm casting hexes through the breach. Before he knows what hit him, Snape is flat on his arse across the office and his wand is spinning on the stones at Harry's feet.

Merlin, but it's a beautiful thing!

"You cast Expelliarmus," Snape says, looking like he's been force fed a bubotuber as he gets to his feet. "Why?"

"Disrupt your spell...Sir," Harry mumbles, and inside his locked-down, throbbing head, I can just barely follow the exchange over the Chorus's idiot chant. I cast a _vivat_ charm, hoping to lift a bit of the ache for both of us, but all that happens is Snape's oily voice gets a little clearer.

"Hmph. Typical arrogance. The Dark Lord, you'll find, does not require his wand to maintain his legilimency." Snape is all scorn, but I can hear a deep current of confusion underneath. He's underestimated Harry, and he's not sure how, and he bloody well _hates_ it. Warms me to the cockles of my heart, I tell you. I lean against the touchstone's cold walls and grin as I listen to him equivocate. "I suggest you choose a different spell should you manage to repulse me a second time."

Ever happy to oblige an old school chum, I spin him upside down and shake him like a rat when he breaks through Harry's barriers the next time. I almost pants him as well, but Harry's _finite_ drops him to the floor in a heap and queers my aim. The chalk dust leaps from the blackboard in a cloud as my hex strikes it, and Snape looks up with murder in his eye.

There's an interlude for some shouting while Snape avenges his bruised dignity with all the good humour I've come to expect from him. Harry weathers it as wearily as I do, but I can tell he's secretly glad of the respite -- as long as Snape's screaming family insults and launching spittle-spraying rants on undeserved fame and disrespect and blah, blah, fucking blah, he can't be trying to bash his way inside Harry's skull. For Harry, Snape's ham-handed double standards and his vindictive spite are nothing new. He knows the purpose behind them -- knows that if a legilimens can get him mad, it's easier to break through his occlumency.

Or maybe he just doesn't rise to the baiting because he knows now that it's what Snape wants him to do, and he'd sooner lick a gargoyle's nose than give that sadistic, whinging bastard the pleasure, let alone lift a leg to piss on him if he were on fire. Oh wait. That's me, isn't it?

Once he works out that Harry's not actually listening to him, but just waiting for him to stop shrilling, Snape gets quiet. That, I remember. Means he's humiliated, that does. It means he's underestimated his opponent, and he knows he's going to really have to work to get his pound of flesh. And that means we're almost there.

I content myself with a bat-bogey hex and a tarantella next time. Not much more than a humiliating nuisance, but they're about all I can manage at this point, and at least it's a bit of fun watching Snape flap and jig about for a bit. Harry, swaying on his feet, is not much better off than I am. We're both just this side of exhausted, and we don't have to speak to each other to know how close we are to the end. Migraine is closing like a vise around his skull, making his stubbornly-held touchstone waver and jump with his every breath, and as for me, I can almost feel the long backward slide of oblivion eroding my foothold in his brain. It's time. If we play this right, we'll have just enough strength left to do what we came here for. I hope.

Snape, humiliated once more, gives me the cover of a brief shrieking rant while Harry cradles his head in both hands and steadies his breath. I scramble to fetch the Mirror of Erised -- or rather the reflection of it that Harry and I stole on our second night back at school -- from my pocket. I enlarge it from thumbnail size, past its normal height, until it's a match in scale for that damned whispering archway. Then start dragging it around to face the jagged rend Snape's torn from floor to ceiling in the wall.

He's in before I'm ready this time. I don't have the wand in my hand. I don't have the mirror in place. His beady black eyes flick around the touchstone's blurring scene, scraping past the endless shadowplay of my death, taking in the fractured walls and flickering non-light. Then his glance sweeps past the spot where I'm standing, and it staggers. Then they widen, those eyes -- they widen with real horror as they fix on my face.

He sees me. I don't bloody well know how he can when Voldemort's never done, but damn it, he _sees_ me!

_FUCK!_

Snape staggers back a step, breath going ragged as the blood drains from his face, and damn it would be a lovely thing if I weren't scrambling to get the bloody wand out of my sleeve. I'd love to give him a grin and a two-finger salute before I blast him right back onto his arse, but I don't dare take the time. For all his bollocks, Snape's one hell of a duelist, and I just barely get the spell off in time without stopping for cheek. If he hadn't been caught on the back foot, I'd never have done it at all.

Harry staggers, slouches and droops against the wall, panting as if he'd run a mile. The touchstone image is wavering, flaking away in staticy drifts as I try to dredge up the power for a decent _ennervate_. No good. I haven't got it in me. I don't even think I could levitate the mirror into place now that I've wasted that blast on Snape.

If the git is shouting, neither of us is listening to him; the roar of Harry's pulse is louder by far. I can feel the despair closing over his head, taking me along with it, and _damn it_, I will not lose like this!

"We've not lost yet, Harry," I tell us both, setting my shoulder to the mirror and shoving for all I'm worth. "You just keep him busy, you hear me? You keep him talking, and then you get him back in here, and we'll just _see_ who's dropped the quaffle!"

I throw my weight at Erised, reminding it and myself that we're both no more than shadows, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to haul the damned thing into place, no matter how much smaller and thinner than it I seem to be. It isn't precisely convinced, but still it shifts, scraping across the floor gone gritty and pitted with distraction. The breach waits, smug and jagged through the touchstone's granite walls. Beyond it, in the world where Harry is real, and I am dead, I can hear/feel/sense the jostling as Snape takes hold of Harry's shoulders and gives him a savage shake.

"What have you done, you utter idiot," he snarls, "What the HELL HAVE YOU DONE?"

"Nothing!" Harry yelps. I shove harder.

"Liar! Selfish, idiotic, muggle-brained FOOL!" he slaps Harry. Actually slaps him, and by Godric's hairy nightshirt, I would break his arm for it if I could touch him!

"Stoppit," Harry lets his head rock aside, not bothering to try and hold his own weight. I can feel his nose dripping blood, hot and tickling down his upper lip. "Don' know wha' y'r talking-"

"You think this is a _game_, Potter? You think necromancy is a harmless diversion for spoiled young brats to play with when they're bored over the summer? Do you think your celebrity allows you free rein with the Dark Arts?" His teeth flash, yellow and jagged as he gives Harry another shaking, and Merlin, but his breath is foul. "What spell did you use? Where did you find it? Who taught you? ANSWER ME!"

"NOBODY!" Harry shouts back, his nails scrabbling on Snape's robes, "Nobody taught me anything! Just like fucking USUAL AROUND HERE!"

The mirror rocks and judders a few inches farther. I catch it as it tilts crazily, then ease it down to rest against the wall -- solid and icy and blank. Snape and the Veil Chorus are both eerily quiet.

"You arrogant little fool," he whispers at last, pushing Harry back against the wall and holding him there. "You lied when I asked you about the dreams, about the Dark Lord, and your occlumency exercises. You lied about it all, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?"

"No," Harry grinds out, just uncertain enough. "They were different dreams. Not like last year."

"And because they offered you what you wanted, you believed them," Snape's lip curls in disgust. "Merlin spare us from gullible bloody schoolboys who think they're too clever to pay for their actions!" If I weren't so tired, I'd laugh at the hypocrisy of those words coming from a man with the Dark Mark on his left wrist. As it is, I just grit my teeth, lean on the Erised's chill-steaming backside, and wait for Harry to lure the bastard in.

"Tell me of these dreams then," Snape says, stalking across the office to perch on his desk. "Every detail. Leave nothing out."

Harry blushes. I can feel the heat of it all around me. "No," he says, wiping the blood from his lip. "They were just dreams. Ordinary dreams. I don't have to tell them to you!"

There could be no more perfect bait in all the world.

Snape fires the spell, and I stand behind the mirror and watch him coming. From this side, Erised is just like the mirror in Harry's muggle bedroom -- I can see Snape through it, can see his ugly face twisted with rage as he storms through the breach he'd kicked in Harry's defenses. I can see the deadliest spells he knows crowding into his mouth as he prepares to hunt me down, and tear me out of this refuge, to find whatever nightmare revenant he thinks I've become, and destroy it utterly.

The mirror bows out toward me as he hits it. I jump back, shadow-wand in my hand, ready and more than ready to scrape the last spark of magic from my dead soul together for one good curse at the bastard when that fragile glass gives way... But it _doesn't_. It warps around his thoughtform, it creaks with strain as it absorbs his furious momentum, but it holds together somehow. And as the moments throb by in the tempo of a frightened boy's heart, the mirror eases back to plumb, frost steaming gently from its surface in the stunned silence.

And I don't know what I'm doing. I don't. Still making all this up, remember? I've no idea what I'll find when I scrape the white rime from the mirrorback. I can't know that I'll see Snape there, still and startled as if frozen in lake ice. I can't know that I'll be able to look into his eyes and _watch_ that hard, hateful bitterness melt. I can't know that I will, for the first time in my entire life, see Severus Snape smile with genuine, unclouded happiness.

It's enough to give me the screaming abdabs.

"Professor?" I hear Harry ask in a shaking, anxious whisper. "Are you all right?"

Is he? Somewhere in my withered soul, I reckon about where my conscience would have been if I hadn't sprouted out of the naffing house of Black, I remember the night when James and me first stumbled across Erised. I remember what Dumbledore said when he found us sleeping on the floor in front of it the next morning. "Men have wasted away before this mirror," he'd told us, and his eyes were dead serious as he covered the thing over, shrank it down and put it into his pocket, "They have starved and died, entranced by what they have seen in it. Some have even run mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible."

And I look at Snape's wide-open, wholly unguarded eyes, I watch tears glitter there -- tears, by Merlin. He's not all right. This is not anything like all right. Because I think I can probably guess, from the bloodless clench of his right hand over his left forearm, what Erised is showing him, and Merlin no, he'd never want to leave it. Because something in him is going to break down that much more when he has to wake up and realize that none of it was real. Because out of everything I have ever done to that poor greasy bastard, I have never, ever done anything as cruel as this.

"Professor Snape!" Harry staggers across the room, waves a hand in front of that beatific, unresponsive face. "Wake up! Come on, please!" His fear is starting to overcome the weary headache, starting to shake the resolve that's fuelled his every step this past two weeks.

And that knocks me out of my tailspin. Because whatever else happens, Harry can NOT stop trusting me -- not even if I doubt myself.

I raise the wand -- a reflection casting wrongwise through a mirror that can't be where it stands, or do what it's done -- I don't even let myself wonder if the spell will work. It's Snape's wand. Of course it will. _Obliviate_ and _somnus_ are the best escape I can think of -- for Snape, trapped in his heart's desire, for Harry's aching, besieged brain, for my own cringing guilt. I think we're all somewhat relieved when Snape's eyes go suddenly blank and then roll back into his head.

Harry summons the elf that's still so fond of him, tells the creature that Snape's tired and wants to be put to bed, then he slips out of the office while it's scampering to obey. His footsteps are careful and quiet as he carries us away from the Dungeons, but his thoughts are racing far too fast to follow.

And as for me, I'm as quiet as I know how to be. If I were in my own skin, or even in my own mirror, I'd be thinking about all this from under black fur, licking my bollocks to ground myself when the weirdness of it all got to be too much. But in Harry's brain, I want to be still. I want to behave and not seem like a megalomaniac dark wizard's sending, like a trap that's already lured him in too far to escape.

Because I'm fairly sure -- almost as sure as I can possibly be -- that I'm not. But remembering that awful joy on Snape's face, that's enough to shake even my self-confidence. And I'm always right!

But when he gets back to his trunk, and the hand mirror he'd bought in Kings Cross station, then enlarged and stuck into the lid of it, Harry doesn't banish me from his mind. He doesn't shut me out and curl up for a think-through like any sane kid with a convicted murderer barking about his brain should do. He doesn't even kick me to the kerb and scribble in his journal book.

Instead he undresses. He washes his face and cleans his teeth with slow, precise movements. He stares at the bathroom mirror for awhile, as though looking for me in his own gaze, then he shakes his head and he goes to bed.   
And then once he's asleep, he wraps himself tight around me, and doesn't say a word about what we've just done, what it might mean, what it might have done.

And he doesn't let me say a word either.

 

~*~

 

"No."

"Please, I want you to. Please, just-"

"No. Not that."

"I'm not a little-"

"Kid. You are too. Ahh, Merlin, Harry... You are a kid, and I'm dead, and I don't bloody well care about either one, but that doesn't make them less true."

"Then why won't you-"

"Because I sodding love it when you whinge like a fucking toddler, obviously! Can't bloody well get enough of it, especially when I've hold of your John Thomas. Oh, and the pouting's a nice touch too. Could bloody trip on that lip, couldn't you?"

"Fine."

"Ooh, sulking -- even better!"

"FINE! IF YOU DON'T WANT ME, THEN YOU CAN JUSMPHL!"

Five minutes later, both our mouths are bruised. There are suckmarks on Harry's throat and clawed scrapes across my shoulders, and our spunk is slowly cooling in the sweaty, sticky press of flesh between us. He's all rubbery limbs and heaving lungs in my arms, and pinning him against the wall of his dream is as much a matter of me not having the strength to move away as anything else.

"Why?" This time it isn't a whinge. It isn't a demand or some petulant attempt at manipulation. This time it's a whisper, breathed into the dampness behind my ear as he lays his head to my shoulder as if to sleep within his dreaming. This time he asks it as if he actually wants to know.

Which makes it such a bitch that it's a question I don't know how to answer. It isn't the Godfather thing, or his age, or mine, or Moony, or Snape, or any of the hundreds of reasons any sane person could think of for me not actually shagging the boy. But I can't say what it is, beyond that I just... can't.

"Harry," I say, gentling us both to the floor. His dreamscape slips a voluptuous bed underneath us at once. "I'm going to tell you something. It's not what you want to hear, but I spent twelve years in Azkaban learning it, and you don't have twelve years, so you need to learn it quicker than I did."

And yeah, now I have his attention, green and sharp as glass, his stare cuts through the afterglow, so focused I'm amazed he hasn't snapped us both awake. "What?" he asks, prepared to be wounded, but willing to take it on the chin if he has to, if I'll give it to him. Merlin love this kid, what am I to do with such loyalty? What can I do, except wind Harry into my arms and kiss him again, and tell him the truth?

"Knowing why doesn't help," I say, soaking up the heat and the stickiness and the realness of his body against mine. "Things still carry on the same, whether you understand or not. Sooner or later, you just have to stop wasting your time in asking why, and save your energy for 'how'."

"Mmm," he allows, cuddling drowsy and close as that ferocious attention diffuses back into comfort. "I like 'when' better."

And the wake of his falling asleep pulls me down after him before I can give him the pinch that deserves.

~*~

 

Thing about life is that it goes on, right? It doesn't stop to applaud when you've got away with something, whether it's stealing the Slytherin house mascot and painting GRYFFINDORS RULE down its belly, hoisting your best enemy to the top of the astronomy tower's lightning rod by his underpants, or losing your virginity right underneath the tree during the Yule Ball in fifth year. Or escaping from Azkaban and proving yourself innocent of murder. Or picking a path through not-quite-death by luck and by instinct and by the sheer, gravitational force of someone needing you to live. Or finding a way to turn the tables on a right pillock who's been making your life a misery for six long years.

Life just carries right on, and with it comes homework and friends, and Chocolate Frogs, and flirting girls, (and Merlin, but someone should teach that kid how to flirt back before those birds do themselves a mischief!) and exams and reviews and Quidditch practice, and it expects you to carry right along with it, just the same as you did before. And so we do, Harry and I both. And if Harry is a bit more... reflective than before, if he shows people a bit more of what they want to see, and a bit less of what's really there... well, a bit of camouflage when you're being hunted by a genocidal madman isn't exactly a bad thing, now, is it?

And if Harry's not quite so scared during his occlumency lessons, if he isn't half-frozen for worrying what Snape might find if he bashes his way in -- well, that doesn't mean he doesn't try as hard. If anything, remembering that awful expression on Snape's face when he hit the mirror makes Harry work all that much harder to keep the bastard from even getting through to begin with. And when he is too tired to go on, and when Snape does get through, Erised is still there waiting for him. Sure, Harry's obliviatus gets a bit of a workout over the next few weeks, but he still gets better, gets stronger, learns more from the book and the mirror than Snape's bash-and-berate style ever managed alone. And isn't that what counts?

And if Harry doesn't spend quite so much time with his friends, but studies on his own? If he reads his books and practices his charms in his room, with the lid of his trunk propped open at the foot of his bed so he can check his form in the mirror? Well who's to complain when he gets that much better at dueling, at potions, at charms, and positively brilliant at transfiguration? And if he misses a few meals because he's studying on his own and has to scrounge after hours in the kitchen, the house elves like him anyhow, don't they?

And if I happen to steal the reflections of a few dozen books out of the restricted section, and read every damned word I can find on enchanted mirrors and the long term effects a wizard might suffer from exposure to them... well, it's the least I can do, isn't it?

Because Erised's reflection isn't content to be a stranger to Harry's brain. It may have come in as a countermeasure against invasion, but after about a week, it... naturalizes, I suppose. Acclimates. When Harry summons up the touchstone image, it's just where I left it -- a one-way, glassy soultrap straddling Snape's favourite approach -- but at other times, when Harry's relaxed, thinking or dreaming without the pressure of attack bearing down on him, Erised just blends into the thoughtscape or dreamscape. A door, a window, a massive, cloudy crystal, a pool of very cold water -- whatever makes sense. Harry always knows where Erised is, but I sometimes miss the thing when he pulls me into his dreaming for a talk or a snog or a wank or so that I can refuse, yet again, to take things any farther than that. Sometimes Harry has to stop me blundering right into the damned shadow. And sometimes I wonder what would happen if he didn't.

And then sometimes Harry doesn't wheedle for more, but embroils himself in what we do have, pliant and hungry for touch he accepts from no living creature, with eyes slitted and lips soft in passion, and he is simply beautiful. Sometimes afterward, he curls himself around me -- sated, slippery and golden-warm, skin pressed to my skin, smelling all of grass and wind and rain and boy and living, and his dreaming mind holds us both as if we're safe enough to sleep entwined forever. And sometimes his breath across my collarbone is damp and warm and almost, almost fills me with the kind of peace that living never brought me. And on those sometimes, I have to wonder if I haven't fallen into Erised's trap already.

Because this half-life of smoke and mirrors is a far sight better than I ever thought death was meant to be. Because I've been lucky all my life, but my luck was never, ever this good.

~*~

 

The usual sound awakens me from slumber.

"Sirius," Harry whispers again, a little more urgently.

The leaden sky says it's far too early for Gryffindors to be stirring, so I roll over, drape an arm across Harry's reflection, and pull him close to soothe him back to sleep. The tension in his frame resists, and suddenly I'm aware of the tremble beneath Harry's skin, the muted, silencing spell quality of his querulous whisper, the gleam of his eyes, wide and worried in the sluggish light. Snapping fully awake, I sit up and slide across the reflected bed to peer through the trunk-lid mirror that separates us. Harry sits up carefully, and as he turns to face me, I can see that he's got one hand pressed against his forehead.

I scramble for my talking mirror. "It's him, isn't it?" I growl against the glass, "It's Vol-"

"No! Don't say it!" Harry bleats, startling me. Since when is Harry afraid to say the bastard's name?

My confusion must show on my face, because he leans close to his own talking glass to whisper. "He's still... here."

And just like that, my blood freezes solid.

It's been months of nothing from Voldemort since my morsmordre got Harry out of Little Whinging. Months have gone by without that bastard's meddling. Week upon week of the kid and I sparring through mirrors, studying, practicing, of Harry getting stronger, surer, finding the faith in himself and his magic that his dad never got the chance to give him. Weeks of silence while Harry and I spent the nighttime hours coiling ourselves around each other's names to remind us of what's real and what's important and just exactly what we have to lose. Weeks of occlumency and waiting, and in all that time, we've never talked about why the Death Eaters made the papers weekly but Voldemort, after a summer of near-constant harassment, was now staying clear. We never talked about what might happen when the bastard finally did decide it was worth his trouble to break back into Harry's brain again, but neither one of us imagined for a minute that he wouldn't. Not for a single moment.

"Get him out, Harry!" I'm whispering, furious as I struggle into my robes and grope my wand out of the pocket. "Boost him! Don't you give him a moment to get a-"

"No!" He hisses and shakes his head, glancing sidelong through the bedcurtains. "It's not like that. I mean he's here, but not…not like before."

"Harry, you're awake, damn it! You can't let him-"

"I know! But he -- it doesn't hurt. He's..." Harry's throat works in a convulsive swallow, and his eyes dart with nerves as he tightens his fingers in his sweaty fringe -- more as in anxious than pained. "I think he's... distracted."

One of his roommates' snores hitches into a grunt, then smoothes back over into the tapestry of night time boy-noises. I stare at Harry's eyes, spot the excitement underneath the creeping horror. Mark how his breath comes in tiny, hope-filled gasps, pick apart his words in my shuddering memory until I know precisely what it is he isn't telling me.

Voldemort's come back to Harry's dreamscape because he's found Erised's shadow.

"Legilimens!" I shout. Harry isn't ready for it, doesn't have his wand in hand, isn't expecting me to slither through the secret door without him having first thrown it open for me. He's never wanted to keep me out before. That may be the only reason I get in now.

At first glance it looks like the thoughtscape; there's the curving amphitheatre in measured descent toward the dais where, limned in directionless light, the Dark Lord reborn stands face to face with an arch of stone and its fluttering veil, hissing in the tongue of serpents to the unseen Chorus behind it. I reckon I know just what he'll ask for, too!

But Harry's on me before I can so much as raise my wand at the bastard. Seeker-quick, he grabs my arm, drags the wand down to point at the floor, and somehow grapples me back into the shadows. I let him wind himself about me, let him clench a fist in my hair, another in my sleeve, let him shoulder me back against the wall, as if any of that will really stop me for long. He doesn't know what I can do without resorting to magic, but something about the sight of Voldemort's pallid, scaly backside suggests this isn't the best time for Harry to find out.

He doesn't twich as Harry presses his lips to my ear. "Don't!" he whispers, furious and barely audible. "That isn't what you think!"

I take a sniff, and the stale, snaky smell tells me otherwise -- that IS Voldemort, and he IS in Harry's waking brain, hissing out a deal with the Chorus, and there bloody well isn't any good reason to 'don't' at all. And then I realize what he means. The arch -- it's too narrow, too tall. The stones too light, too finely hewn, too golden in colour, its veil is just a little closer to grey than black, and light, faint as ground mist, seeps from beneath its tattered, restless hem.

That isn't the Veil. Not the one that killed me, anyway; it's Erised. It has to be.

Startled, I scan the rest of the room, now making out the shadowy figures that perch in attentive ranks around the amphitheatre. No face is any more distinct than a pale smudge in the gloom, but each one is focused raptly on the conversation taking place below. Bastard always did love an audience, didn't he?

"What's he saying?" I ask. Harry starts and shivers at the sound of my voice cutting through the weaving sibilance. He's clinging to me now not so much to obstruct as for some reassurance that he isn't alone in the presence of his enemy. He glances at me, shakes his head and shudders again, though I know damned well he can hear the bastard as clearly as I can. He doesn't want to say, doesn't want to tell me what Voldemort is asking for. What he's up to.

"Harry, you can't just let him-"

"Shh, not yet. I need to watch. I need to --" He grips my arm with cold, panicked fingers. "Look!"

From beneath the drifting tatters of the false veil, the furtive glow suddenly strengthens, steadies, limning the amphitheatre's stones and Voldemort's leprous, scaly feet in an icy light. Stronger still, it flares once, twice, each time erasing all but the hardest lines, all but the most persistent shadows. I'm still there when the tattered curtains part, and so is Voldemort.

And so is Harry, back pressed against my chest now, with my arm pulled across him as though to steady one or the other of us. Every scrap of his attention is fixed on the figure that's stepping out from all that hanging grey, padding wrongwise across that one-way threshold on bare, soft feet.

He's about Harry's size, perhaps a little shorter, just a bit skinnier. The lightness of his frame suggests pliancy, delicacy, perhaps even frailty. Something about the way he carries himself speaks subtly of obedience, tractability, submission. And that would have my hackles standing even without the fact that every inch of the false boy's skin is gleaming like sunstruck chrome.

Harry -- the real one -- shudders as the mirrorboy steps close to Voldemort's side looks up into that hideous face, and whispers something in Parseltongue. The room curves across his half-shy quicksilver smile, and then that bastard, that should-be-fucking-dead-twice-over son of a snake reaches out and covers the gleaming cheek with his sodding hand.

And he laughs!

And a piece of my soul breaks off -- I can feel it go, like mortar dust drifting away on a breeze. And I realize, in a distant, frightened part of me, that I will do anything -- anything, you understand -- to keep my Harry out of that murdering hand's reach.

Anything it takes.

One hard shake of my arm sends Harry sprawling at my feet. Three steps down carry me out of his reach. Voldemort half-turns at the echoing yelp from behind him, but I've my wand in hand already, and one fucking word's all the time it takes to blast a stunning spell straight into his scaly face.

His eyes are scarlet as he whirls, bloody and bright as the flying hexlight. His eyes are red and wide in the ruddy glare off the mirrorboy's screaming face, and the spell isn't faster, somehow, than those damned red... His eyes are the colour of fury and triumph as they sift me from the shadows, as they recognize my face, as they name me, place me in his own personal mythology.

"Black?" he says in the shattered second just before my stunning spell hits him. The word shoves me back like a punch to the gut -- crushes the breath out of me, sends me staggering under the force of my own name on the wrong bloody lips.

Then my spell crashes home, blasts Voldemort's thoughtself away to white ash and flying leather. The backlash of his collapse tears through Harry's thoughtscape like a bomb's shockwave, flattening the motionless shadow-audience like wheat.

It's no kinder to me. I feel myself shattering, splitting apart into buzzing, confused sparks. Shunted out of shape and out of definition; groundless, formless, nothing but a name and a lifetime of quivering memories.

Just that -- and a talking mirror in one of my pockets, and a wand clenched in my fist.

Then I'm reeling back together, falling back into my own skin, or what passes for it in this mirrorworld. I land with a grunt and a bounce, stunned and panting across the reflection of Harry's bed. My head rings like a stricken bell, and I'm almost sure I've been split in half by that eviction. I've taken bludgers to the skull that hurt less.   
Buzzing and befuddled, I clutch my head in both hands and wonder what the hell just happened. He saw me, like Snape saw me. He fucking named me! Who's to say he couldn't have fought back if I'd not got the drop on him? Who's to say he couldn't have won?

I roll over with a groan, prise Harry out of his foetal curl, and drag both hands away from his forehead. His skin is clammy, and Merlin's hairy drawers, but that must have hurt him. There's no doubt about it; I'm an idiot. Completely, and without question.

"Hey," I whisper, brushing my lips along Harry's sweaty temple, smoothing his hair carefully. "Hey now, Harry. You mustn't frighten me like this, because you know I'm an idiot, and I'd never mean to hurt you, really. Up you get now...Come on..."

But no. Up he does not get. He barely even blinks open his eyes before Voldemort's fury crashes down on him. He shocks rigid in my arms, arches back as if in lightning's grip, mouth wide, teeth clenched tight on a strangled scream. Across his brow, the scar splits and bleeds.

And just like that last night in Little Whinging, all I can do is hold his reflection. Hold him all night long, and curse myself in harmony with my Godson's every thrashing scream.

 

~*~

 

The silencing spell on Harry's bedcurtains lasts until morning. Ron Weasley, may Merlin bless him with many sons, finally notices that Harry's missing and throws open the curtains to find him pale as death and twisted up tightly in his sopping sheets. The kid takes one look at Harry's clawmarked face, at the jagged, blood-smeared slash of that scar across his forehead, at the shallow, pained rhythm of Harry's breathing, and runs like a greyhound for the Headmaster's office.

Cue pandemonium.

Of course none of Harry's rescuers know to grab the talking mirror from his night table when they move him to the infirmary, so the best I can do to follow along is to slip like a ghost from mirror to mirror, and cram myself forcibly into the portraits when I don't have any other choice. That's confusing, frustrating, and rather painful, actually -- I used to be able to move from painting to painting with no more trouble than the proper mirrors. I tell myself I'm just tired -- bloody well knackered from restraining Harry's fits all night. That must be why crossing through them makes the paintings groan and tremble in their frames, and I refuse to waste time wondering if it could have anything to do with my name on the Dark Lord's lips.

Because my Harry's hurt, isn't he? So nevermind the bollocks like where I can fit, and what I can do, and who can see me when they bloody well never could do before, damn it! Harry needs me to watch over him, and since the infirmary is full of mirrors which still work just as well as they did yesterday, that's all I care about.

Damn it!

The staff gathers in the vestibule as Mediwitch Pomfrey makes her examination. They've all had their chance to ogle Harry's paste-white skin, his grey lips and his fevered, constant shivering. They all know the symptoms of Cruciatus torture, whether by personal experience or horrible rumour in the staffroom. But Weasley and all Harry's other roommates swear that nobody came into their room last night and that Harry was alone in his bed. And of course the castle wards breathed not a flicker of intrusion. What need has Voldemort to challenge those when he's got the key to Harry's defenses flowing right inside his veins?

I listen to their debate with only half an ear, settling in dog shape alongside his still, pale reflection. I know who tortured Harry last night, after all, just as I know who it was that drew that fire down. No mystery for me in the boy's sorry state -- I know exactly who to blame.

And no, it isn't Voldemort.

If Harry would only wake, I'd beg his forgiveness. I'd swear a thousand times over that I'll never cause him such pain again, that I'll die and kill to keep him from harm, to keep him from Voldemort. But of course I've wanted to make that promise before, haven't I? And thusfar, neither killing nor dying seem to have made a damned bit of difference in what the kid, or anybody else I've ever loved, has to suffer.

Well. Not dying, anyway. I've yet to manage killing, though five minutes alone with Peter's reflection might just change that. Or I'd take cousin Bellatrix, if the rat's not on offer. I'm just saying.

It's a fantasy almost pleasant enough to distract me from my guilt. For a few blissful hours I sleep and shed black fur across Harry's infirmary bed. And if I dream of snapping the backs of rats with silver paws, or of turning laughing, grey-eyed madwomen inside out so their lungs see the light of day... well, my twitching doesn't seem to trouble the kid.

~*~

 

As the light grows long and mellow and the day grows old and Harry still, still, still doesn't wake, they start to get desperate. They start to think they might need to know exactly what's happened, and that any cost is worth it.

They start to talk about sending Snape into Harry's head to find out.

From my vantage on the far wall, it's like watching a train wreck. Snape's proven time and again since school term began that he can't break Erised's hold. Without Harry awake to knock him back into his own greasy skull, the snide, sneering bastard doesn't have a hope in hell of getting out under his own power.

And Dumbledore's standing just there. Not a chance he'll see that beatific expression take hold of Snape's face and not ken that something's dreadfully wrong. No chance he'll fail to want to set things 'right'. No chance.

There's nothing I can do. Harry's been locked down tight since Voldemort attacked -- his mind iced over in magic as featureless and smooth as a phoenix's black egg. Even my secret entrance is cut off. No slipping in under the doorsill this time -- believe me, I've been trying all night. I'm stuck here across the infirmary, twiddling my stolen wand between my fingers and wondering how long it'll take Snape to convince Dumbledore to hunt me down when...

When Harry wakes up.

With a cough, he surges upright in the sheets, peers frantically about the room while the staff leap like scalded cats and scramble to get their wands out. He doesn't notice them, gasping, searching with wide, wild eyes, and by Merlin's bollocks, I know what he's looking for -- who he's looking for! It fills me with such a relief as not even the threat of Snape can dampen.

There are no words for what the sight of my Harry, whole and sound, does to my heart. So I don't bother with words, or a tongue that can speak them. Instead, I leap up against the mirror, paws scrabbling on the icy barrier as I bark out a joyous welcome.

That's all it takes for Harry to find me. I can tell by his wide, unfocused stare that he can't see me properly in this unfamiliar glass -- not like could if he had his talking mirror in hand -- but at least he knows I'm here, that I haven't left him again. You may be sure I take no little comfort in the way that knowledge seems to calm him. It's not actual forgiveness, but in light of the night before, it's close enough for me.

Their questions are predictable, as are their fears, suspicions, and accusations. Snape, of course, thinks Harry's lying. Which technically, he isn't, since every word he tells them about Voldemort's attack is true. He's simply omitted the bits that have to do with me, or Erised's shadow, or Voldemort actually getting inside his head. Which means, of course, that in order to believe Harry's story, Snape has to accept that Harry just might have held off a direct frontal assault from the Dark Lord all night long. He'd rather, I think, be hung by his underpants from the astronomy tower's lightning rod.

I'd rather like to help with that.

McGonagall, from the set of her lips and her shrewd, slitted gaze, seems to suspect that Harry's leaving something significant out of his account. But it's also clear that she'd rather eat her plaidie than suggest anything of the sort in front of Snape. And Merlin, but it's nice knowing that the Lioness will stand up to defend her own to this day. All her doubts aside, I know old Minnie'll have Snape by the ear and yowling before she lets him disrespect her House or her students with impunity.

Dumbledore looks as though he knows something the rest of them don't, but honestly, when doesn't he? He follows Harry's gaze to my mirror rather oftener than I like, but his blue eyes never seem to linger, and if he sees a dog-shaped shadow pressed up behind Harry's reflection, he gives no sign. And if he's suspicious of the holes in Harry's story, he doesn't seem inclined to comment, sparing his energy instead for comforting Hagrid, proffering lemon drops, and casually restraining Snape's baser instincts.

Eventually, Poppy tires of the debate and banishes the lot of them from her domain so that her patient can rest properly. Even Dumbledore gets the benefit of her inexorable shooing, though his lingering regard on the threshold makes it plain that he and his questions will be back before long.

Pomfrey checks Harry closely, noting each bruise, strain, and scratch before she attends to them. She doesn't ask him how he got the wounds, doesn't pry or prod him to confide anything more than whether this or that hurts, and does he think he could eat, or would he rather try and get some more sleep.

He elects for food -- an idea with which I heartily agree. He's too damned skinny already without these night-long workouts. She waits long enough to inspect the meal the house elf brings -- chicken broth, bread, carrots, and treacle pudding -- then she lines up a row of potions at his elbow and starts naming off uses and instructions. This one if he needs to sleep, that one if he aches too much, the other one if he gets cramp or diarrhoea.

Harry listens, nods, and tries his best not to blush. Yes, he'll use the potions if he needs to, yes, he'll call the elf back if he wants more food than what he's got, no thank you, he doesn't think he'll need the bedpan, nor a sponge bath please. Poor mite. I decide not to tell Harry that there was a time back in fifth year, when I'd have traded a square foot of my hide for the chance at having Madam Pomfrey give me a sponge bath. Or that his father, who crushed on her just as hard, used to deliberately get hurt during Quidditch practice, just so he could go and get treated by her.

Poor mite's embarrassed enough already, methinks.

Then, as Poppy's about to leave him to his nosh, he calls her back. "Would it be all right if I talked to the Headmaster for awhile," he asks. "Before I go to sleep, I mean."

She looks askance. "Are you certain, Mr. Potter? You've had a hard time of it, and you really ought to be resting properly."

"I know, it's just," he peers up at her, all ingenuous charm. "It's just I know he'll have questions, and I reckon I'll be able to sleep better if I get them out of the way first. Do you see?"

She allows as how she does see (though by that very fact she proves that she doesn't at all) and bustles off to fetch the old man. I, on the other hand, can't help wondering just what my too-clever-by-half Godson is up to. But, I decide, watching him tuck into his supper, it's not as if this will be the first time I've followed a Potter into the fray without a battleplan. And after what my last attempt at extemporaneous action won us, I reckon I owe him a little blind allegiance, don't I?

So I go under the bed when the Old Man comes in, curl myself up in the shadows and lay my chin down to wait, nose to nose with his carpet slippers. Oddly enough, they smell faintly of bubblegum.

It's like watching a dance, overhearing these two -- Harry fishing openly for news of what Voldemort's been up to since the school year began, Dumbledore hinting more subtly that he somehow knows Harry's linked to some of the odder things that have troubled Hogwarts this year. Slytherins developing strange, fleeting cases of boils and rashes, for instance. My own little experiment in serpent training, that; a reflected boil hex whenever one of them gets stroppy with Harry. It's amazing how quickly they begin to toe the line. Harry, of course, can prove nothing.

They talk about the paintings, how some complain about feeling haunted this year, and lately of being crowded or smashed about in their frames. It is both a worry and a comfort to hear how long the paintings have been complaining about this -- whatever's happening to me, at least I can reasonably assume that Voldemort isn't to blame. They talk about how for some reason, the mirrors in the Gryffindor bathrooms all seem particularly sluggish, and sometimes complain about lost time or feeling very cold. They talk about how the Prophet is taking particular care not to have an opinion on what the Dark Lord might be up to or what the Ministry might be doing about it. It goes without saying that he's planning something, of course. When has he not been?

Then the Headmaster brings up the very last topic I'd care to hear about. "I wonder," he muses as Harry finishes off his treacle pudding, "if you recall the Mirror of Erised, Harry?"

Harry drops his spoon into the bowl. "Can't very well forget it," he mutters, "not after first year and all."

"Have you seen it about... recently?" asks Dumbledore, in the voice that goes right along with that over-the-spectacles, mildly curious, already-knows-the-answer look he gets.

"Yeah," Harry says, not even bothering to think about lying. "It was up on the fourth floor back in August. I saw it in the parlour where the stairs for the astronomy tower let out near the Ravenclaw study hall. Why?"

Dumbledore hesitates before answering. I can almost picture his expression of mild surprise at getting the truth so easily. "I simply wondered if, at that time, you'd noticed anything... odd about it."

Odd, he says? I snort. What, like the fact that it reflects your hidden desires instead of what's really there isn't odd enough?

Harry, though, doesn't bite. "Odd, sir? How do you mean?"

"Odd, Harry, in that it seems to have misplaced its shadow."

Uh oh.

This time it's Harry hesitating. "That is odd, sir," he allows at last, with just the perfect tint of mystified awe to his voice. Under the bed, I can't help cringing. Because Prongs was past master of that innocent tone, and it never, ever failed to put the Headmaster right on his guard when James tried to pull it off on him.

The silence deepens until I can't stand it any longer. I slither out from under the bed, to find the Headmaster regarding Harry levelly, not a single trace of twinkle in those shrewd, blue eyes. Harry's staring straight back, not a trace of shame to be found on his face. Lily's look, that is -- the one she always used on Prongs when she was in danger of not getting her way. The one that seems to say 'you could win this point, but you'd better be sure it will cost you later.'

Dumbledore recognizes the look too, I think. He sighs, removes his spectacles, and charms them clean. "Harry," he says, settling them back on his nose and peering soberly over top of them, "is there anything you would like to tell me?"

Harry's face doesn't change, but the look in his eyes softens, just so much in the instant before he looks away. "Yes, sir," he says, his lips twisting in a faintly ironic smile, "Yes I do. But I don't think I will tell you just yet. There's a few more things I have to get done first."

Dumbledore blinks. So do I. "Such as?" he asks, dangerously mild.

Harry shakes his head. "Just some things. Tying up loose ends, you know? Probably best if you don't bother with the details. Although," and here he turns a look like a dare on the old man's startled face, "I think I'll need to borrow the mirror of Erised over Christmas Hols. If you don't mind, that is."

Sweet Merlin, but his sheer nerve is stunning. Voldemort hasn't got a chance against nerve like that, I tell you! Whatever Harry's wild plan is, if it's insane enough to have him bearding Dumbledore to his face, well I'm behind it all the way! I'd bark in delight if I weren't halfway convinced the old man would turn around and see me. Instead I turn a few circles, and thump Harry's knee with my tail, waiting for the next miracle.

Which is when Dumbledore laughs, pats Harry on the knee, and says, "We've three weeks to discuss it, Harry, I'm sure we can come to an agreement before then." He stands, gathering his robes about him. "In the meantime, I have it on good authority that Madam Pomfrey intends to come in here with her wand drawn if you are not asleep within the half hour. You'd best get to it, I suppose." And just like that, he goes.

I'm not sure I've ever seen the like. I am sure I've not had such fun since that time in sixth year when Prongs and I pranked the Slytherin team's brooms with a grease charm in the middle of the championship game. It's all I can do to keep from bounding up on the bed and flattening Harry's reflection for a thorough licking. I don't want to scare the elf that's come to collect Harry's supper tray though, so I spin a couple more circles while I wait for the thing to piss off.

But Harry seems to have other ideas. "Dobby," he says, beckoning the elf back as it starts to shoulder the tray and leave. "Will you do me a favour please?"

"Oh! Harry Potter is wanting something?" the elf squeaks, sliding crazily across the slick tile floor in his ridiculous, too-big socks. "What can Dobby be doing for Harry Potter?"

What indeed? Perplexed, I stop spinning and listen. Even my tail forgets to wag.

"There's something I've left in my room," Harry says, twisting a corner of the sheet around his fingers, "only I don't think they'll let me go and get it."

"Dobby could get it," the elf says, elated at the prospect of usefulness.

Harry nods, not looking up when I bark my approval, though I know he's heard. He looks tired, poor kid. I reckon a cuddle and a bit of a snog will be about the extent of things tonight. Talking things out can wait till the morning, as long as we both have the means at hand. "It's a mirror, just about as big as my hand," he tells the elf, "It should be on my bedside table, right beside my wand."

Clever boy! I grin at Harry's cleverness. The elf won't ask questions the way his friends would, nor will it think to carry tales to those who've no business poking their oversized, greasy noses into Harry's business. I grin and clamber up onto the bed to flop across Harry's feet.

"Dobby will bring it to Harry Potter right away!"

"No, Dobby," Harry says. I sit up, changing shape before I've really thought about it. Something in his voice makes me think I'm not going to like this. "I don't want you to bring it to me," he goes on. "I want... I want you to take that mirror and hide it. I want you to put it somewhere I won't find it. Somewhere nobody will find it until..." he gulps, stares hard at his sheet-wrapped fingers, refuses to look up at my prison-glass. "Until I ask you for it. Can you do that, Dobby?"

"No," I shout. "Don't you dare, you little tosser! Don't you shut me out! You bring that mirror here, and you bloody well TALK to me, do you hear?" I kick the bed, and Harry jumps, but he still doesn't look up. He doesn't look anywhere near my mirror, as though he's afraid to even risk catching a glimpse of me.

Of course that little hat-covered wretch of an elf is only too thrilled to do exactly what Harry's asked. He pings off with a sparkle and snap, and for all I know he's about to throw my lifeline right into the bloody lake. I can't do a single thing to stop him.

"Harry," I cry throw myself at his reflection, take hold of his narrow shoulders and give him a shake. "Harry, I'm sorry. Do you hear me, I'm sorry! I didn't know he'd do that, you have to believe me! You can't do this, not now! I know he'll come back, and you need me Harry!" He pulls back with no more effort than a boy sliding down into his bed to sleep. "Please, Harry," I gasp, clutching my (useless, bloody useless) talking mirror to my lips, so tightly the blood wells around my grip. "Please don't do this. Don't shut me-"

"Nox," he says, and the light goes out.


	4. Chapter 4

"Ouf!" The fat lady squeals, clutching her ample bosoms, "Oh dear Merlin! Oh help!"

I ignore her bellowing and try again. There's no bloody reason I shouldn't be able to get through this bedamned canvas! Thanks to Harry's oh-so-helpful house elf mate, I've no other way to get in or out of Gryffindor Tower, and now this great, overdramatic harpy's got it into her mind to pitch a wobbly whenever I try to squeak past her? I ask you! Mum didn't make half such a fuss, and I bloody well _throttled_ her!

I try another angle, but the Fat Lady only reels and screams like a bean sidhe. If it weren't the last Hogsmeade weekend before Yule Hols, she'd have drawn every spotty sprog in the castle down for a gawk. But those who aren't shopping in town are outside taking advantage of the frozen lake, and the perfect skating weather. And earlier, I spotted a sortie of the ickle Gryffindorlets down the lower field, planning a snowball assault on the Slytherin entrenchment. So this fat cow can scream to the bloody ghosts for all I-"

"Dear Lady! What reason, this cacophony?"

Bloody hell.

"Oh, Nicholas," the Fat Lady wails as I press down low against the wall and go quiet in the hopes that if by some chance the Gryffindor ghost does catch a glimpse of me, he won't recognize my animagus form. "It's terrible! Such a pinch and a press as I'm sure I've never felt! I simply can't bear it!"

Nick puffs himself up, feels about for his sword hilt and strikes a pose. "What heinous spell besets thee, Madam? Name the cad who's harmed you and I shall smite him!"

Smite me, indeed. Last week, I'd have been laughing. A lot's happened since last week. Like Harry taking pains not to come within two feet of a single fucking mirror in the entire castle. Like Mrs. Bloody Norris' reflection following me all over the place, sniffing suspiciously. Like the Bloody Baron catching me in the second floor bog two days after Voldemort knocked me out of Harry's head. He passed my glass by, then stopped, turned, and looked me straight in the eye, his ghostly face twisted into that damned smirk all Slytherins are born with. He didn't say anything to me, because this _is_ the Baron, but he saw me. No mistaking that.

And no, Harry didn't let me tell him about _that_, either. He's been too busy pretending, for the benefit of all those who've been watching him like hawks for the past fortnight, that he's not up to anything.

But I'm not fooled. He can lock me out of his dreams, he can avoid mirrors, he can laugh, he can joke, he can play Exploding Snap, and he can lie still in his bed once the lights go out, but I am _not_ bloody well fooled!

"Oh, Sir Nicholas," the Fat Lady sniffles into her very pink handkerchief, "I'm simply terrified! What if it's him? They all say he's dead, but he was such an awful, cunning creature! What if he's come back to torment me again?" Then she bursts into a volley of tears that would do Hagrid proud.

"Him?" Nick leans in eagerly, "Why you can't mean to say it's Sirius Black?"

"Oh, don't say his name!" She looks wildly about. "He tried to kill me, you know?"

"The cad!"

It's all I can do not to put both paws over my nose and groan. Slash one bloody canvas, and you're the next bloody Dark Lord! I ought to have done a more thorough job of it when I did. Ruddy cow.

But just like before, there seems to be no getting past her. Which is just grand, isn't it? Half bad that I've worn my paws to the bone and numbed my nose trying to sniff out where the damned elf hid Harry's talking mirror, but now I'll have to turn my weary arse around, haul it out into the snow, and work out some way to scale Gryffindor tower from the outside.

I groan and get up, but before I can even shake the dust off my pelt, the tugging starts. Rough and insistent, a portkey jab-and-yank from behind my bollocks -- my leash drawing tight with a snap. I can only choke as the gossip of the ghost and the portrait blur into the roar of blood in my ears.

Not again!

I fight it. Struggle for all I'm worth against Harry's silent summons. "God damn it, no!" I switch shapes to shout as the suffocating darkness whelms me. "You won't look at me, won't say my name, won't let me fucking _explain_-" Another savage yank. The gasp tears my rant in twain. I grip the Fat Lady's frame to steady myself. "You've no bloody right to keep on calling me to fucking HEEL!"

But rights or no, the call keeps pounding at me. He wants me there, wherever he is, and I haven't the traction in me to pull free of his terrible gravity. The frame leaves splinters in my hand as Harry's want tears me away. The Fat Lady's porcine squeal is the last thing I hear.

It's dark. Not the dark of night time and the last hour before dawn, but the dark of sealed coffins and deep caverns where nothing living has ever dreamed of the sky. The kind of dark that's waiting for you at the end of all hope. There's not even a glimmer of light to sketch out hulking monsters or long-leggety beasties from shades of gloom and umbra. This is the kind of darkness that eats all memory of daylit things, leaves you cold and still and very, very alone.

I can feel the mirror-wall just at my back; a fierce burn of chill that makes me cringe down away from it and fight to turn a whimper into a curse. Why the devil can't I see anything? I touch my face, find my cheeks, nose, eyes still whole and in place. Then I try and put out my hand in front of me, and the whimper in my throat wins free.

I'm in the trunk.

"Harry," I gulp as the cheap cloth lining shreds under my nails. "Harry no. Don't do this to me, please!" I pound my fists and kick against the thin boxwood -- custom-charmed and guaranteed to resist the very worst that porters, bellhops, and teenaged boys can dream up, or your Galleons back! It hardly shivers under my heel. Despite the mirror's chill, I'm all over cold sweat, and panting wildly in the tiny space. "Please open this lid, Harry, _please_! I don't care what you're doing, I promise -- I'll stay clear of it, whatever it is, I won't even ask, I'll stay away from you altogether if you want, just please, PLEASE open this lid!"

I'm on the verge of tears, from total panicked hysteria -- and I can't pull back. This is worse than Godric's Hollow and Azkaban, and that horrible three months in sixth term when nobody would talk to me all rolled up together. It's worse than dying -- a million times worse, because I can _ feel_ Harry just there!

He's so close I can hear his breath -- the short, rolling gasps, roughened with tiny, hungry moans. He's so close I can smell his skin -- soapy and warm from the showers, glossed with a hint of sweat and a deepening musk, and Merlin, but I've missed that -- the sex-sweet smell of Harry's skin, the way his whole body arches into the gasp when his fingers delve in deep, how, even when his mouth is wide and wordless, the name rolling off his mind echoes through me like a bell.

Only for the last two weeks, that name hasn't been the right one at all. This is a shorter, harder name -- one that doesn't roll and slide off his tongue like a gentle tide, but pulses out in staccato bursts, like the throb of a heart, or a marching drum. It's not my name Harry calls when he works up his primal magic now. It isn't me he's pleading for, but somehow he always manages to bind me to his side all the same -- watching him, wanting him, helpless in the face of his silence.

And the trunk's closed this time. It's never been before. It's closed, and I can't get it open. (_Can't get it open. Can't fucking -_)

I tell myself he doesn't know what torment that is to me, being kept so close when he won't let me- he doesn't know. He can't know. Just like he doesn't know how much I fucking hate this trunk of his. (Can't break it, get it open, find the lock, claw it loose, _damn it_!) I tell myself he isn't naming anyone. It's just he's chosen a different touchstone -- one that doesn't focus on me, and so of _course_ he'll be needing a different mantra, won't he? (_Get it open get it open get it open_) The book says so, I'm sure of it. Harry simply can't be making a door into his mind for some mad, murdering bastard who has no business there. He isn't offering himself up to the wizard who scarred him and killed his folks, isn't writhing against that snake-white skin and begging to be taken like as he once begged me to take him. (_I will, I will please let me let me OUT!_ He isn't. (_Please_) He can't be.

Harry groans; a meaty, desperate sound. I can hear the wet noises his fingers are making, and the smell of him is tight and thick in my throat. I scream it loose, kick the trunk again, and hate him. (_Hate you let me out!_) I hate him for making me want him so fucking much. Then I hate my traitorous body for hardening, for throbbing needily, for filling my mouth with wet hunger to remember the taste of him. (_Love you let me out!_) Then I hate myself for letting this damned over-emotional _little boy_ keep me from my justly earned death here long enough that I could make the one stinking mistake that would lose him. (_Anything! Anything -- please!_) Then I give all that up and just focus on hating Voldemort, who bloody well deserves it more.__

Harry makes that sound again, this time cut through with a pleading whine.

I smash my head into the mirror, hoping one or the other will break under the Glasgow Handshake and give me either an escape, or the reprieve of a gentler darkness. (_OUT!_)

Snape's wand jabs me hard in the ribs. I'm not an animal. I'm not a squib. I've a wand, I'm a wizard, and by Godric, I will not be bloody well buried yet! I bang my elbow on a textbook getting the wand out of my pocket, but I hardly notice. All that matters is whether or not I've enough room in this bloody half-sized coffin to cast a proper _alohomora_.

I try it. The trunk gives a violent shiver, but it doesn't open -- not even when I set my shoulders against the mirror, my feet to the floor, and strain with all my might. I keep on pushing until the skin of my back goes numb from the cold, but the trunk doesn't give. Right then -- _reducto_ it is. If I can't open it from the inside, I'll bloody well blow the trunk to bits-

The lid gives a snap and a twitch. The smell of magic scorches through my nose, and by the time I'm done sneezing it away, there's light. A hair-thin crease in the darkness -- a lifeline. I shove the trunk open, gasping deep, full breaths -- not so much of air, as of _light_!

Harry whimpers, chokes back a sound that starts with a familiar hiss.

I turn, and there he is -- just as my imagination had painted him: naked and flushed, knees high and wide, feet planted and shoulders propped against the headboard. His cock is furiously red and bouncing over his belly. His tight bollocks roll along the knuckles as he delves his fingers deeply, wetly into himself. His honey-pale skin gleams with sex and sweat in the wintry light from the windows, sticking his wild hair down along his temples and neck. His lips gleam, softly parted, flushed where he must have been biting them quiet. The same greedy flush creeps across his cheeks and collarbones as he thrusts up against his own hand, and his eyes, green and terribly bright beneath his black lashes -- His eyes are fixed, staring hungrily. Straight at me.

My cock gives a surge that's almost painful. Then I remind myself that he can't see me. Even though we've sparred through this mirror countless times, it's always needed the Talkers to let him find me when he's awake. He doesn't see me -- he's just looking at the lid of his trunk, which has burst open without him touching it, and of _course_ he'd look at that. He doesn't see me, though he must know I'm here. But he also doesn't stop what he's doing -- doesn't stop making his body stretch around his fingers, doesn't stop making his cock twitch and weep for touch, doesn't stop thinking that wrong bloody name in his head while he breaks my heart for want of him.

"Harry," I get the word out, somehow, through the wad of lust and jealousy in my throat.

He flinches, gives a stuttering gasp. Then suddenly he's scrambling across the bed, kneeling up, grabbing the trunk lid with one hand and his dripping cock with the other, leaving smears of his precome on the glass as he pulls himself closer and closer to the edge.

If this damned mirror weren't between us, I could (_would_) slap his hand away, open my mouth and take him in to the root. I'd take him into me, swallow him like a sacrament and count myself blessed. Trembling, I yearn as close as I can and squint through the chill to _see_ his orgasm overtake him. When the flush spreads wildly down is chest, and he catches his lip between his teeth, when his gasps become pinned-down grunts, his thighs twitch and his cock jumps between his fingers, painting ropes of pearl across the place where my reflection ought to be.

I open my mouth as if to catch them. But all I can feel is the splat and slide as his reflection's come stripes my cheek on its way past, and Merlin help me, because I _know_ how fucked up it is, but Harry's the only thing that's keeping me real. He's the only force in the whole of this world with enough strength and love and _belief_ to pull me out of the darkness, and I love him so much, need him so much that even the smell of his secondhand spunk is enough to have me sobbing out his name as I come.

I clutch my surging cock through my robes, wring the last bursts from it, and tell myself this is acceptance, maybe even the shadow of forgiveness. (_Anything. Anything._)

Then Harry sags to the bed, still gripping the trunk lid as he presses his cheek to the mirror. He's panting, I can see each breath clouding across the come-stained glass, but Harry hardly seems to care that it's his own spend smears along his soft, kiss-starved lips.

I lean as close as the barrier lets me, desperate, Merlin, desperate to kiss him, so lick away the bitter smears and reclaim that sweet mouth with teeth and tongue and all my heart. I want to kiss the real Harry though, not his reflection.

Then I move around to try, but since the reflection's in the way, the angle puts me face to face with it. And from there, I can see that Harry's lips aren't just working around empty air. They make same shape over and over, the same word, the same war drum feel that's polished my Harry's mind against me these past two weeks. A burst of pain at the head of it, a hum of loathing at the heel, and shaped silent by those rose-pink lips, it looks a hell of a lot like "Tom".

(_No. Not that._)

 

~*~

 

It isn't a conscious decision to run, to bowl Harry's reflection arse over tit and not turn an ear or slow a step at his shout of protest. I don't think about it, don't think about anything at all until I find myself in the Common Room, shivering against the backward pull of Harry's will.

No. I'd sooner go back in the trunk.

"No," I gasp aloud, reeling against the banister, "Not this time, you bastard." I don't know whether I'm talking to Harry, or to the parasite that's stolen him from me, or perhaps to myself, but I do know I have to get away. Because if I lay eyes on Harry's reflection right now, I _will_ curse him with something far worse than boils.

I cast a quick _protego_ on myself, and in the brief, startled respite that wins me, I change my shape and bolt for freedom. Nothing, not the Dark Lord, not Harry's desperate gravity, not my own failing intangibility, and certainly nothing so flimsy as the Fat Lady's painting will stop me getting loose. The splitting tear of canvas spins her tirade into a throaty shriek, but then I'm through, shouldering Nick and the Grey Lady sprawling as I tear off down the staircase on scrabbling paws.

Peeves, at least, is amused.

~*~

I outrun Harry's will. Or maybe the mess I've made at the Common Room door distracts him. Or maybe he's just as glad to have me gone. I don't know, but by the time I make it down enough stairs to get a shot at the Entry Hall, the summons has at last faded away. That, and that alone, clears my head enough that I can bear to stop and _think._

I know the kid's been under siege these past two weeks. Voldemort's drawn to Erised's eerie seduction like a wasp to honey -- how could he not be when that sweet little not-Harry is there to hiss out whatever secrets he wants to hear? And yeah, there's every possibility he doesn't even _see_ the real Harry around the mirrorboy's offering, but what if… what if… what if the secrets it's offering are the truth? What if Erised is actually seducing them both?

I wouldn't be so shaken by all this, only I can tell that Harry's scared too. I can read fear in his too-still sleep at nights, in the determined set of his jaw when he decides he won't look up into the mirror where he _must_ know I am, in the hours he spends with Hermione, endlessly reviewing that damned book I gave him. He has a plan, that's clear enough, but it's also clear that he's just as badly out of his depth as am I.

And the one thing I know for sure, is that Erised is at the heart of it. I have given my Godson the one tool which seems to have the power to destroy him, and by Godric's balls, I will not let that stand!

Erised -- the real one -- is down in Snape's territory. I heard the Headmaster telling the elves to move it there last week. He must have rightly suspected that if he gave Harry half a chance, he'd 'borrow' the thing without waiting for the permission the Headmaster still hasn't granted him. It shouldn't take me long to find the thing -- with Snape watching it, there's only two or three places it could possibly be.

So I'll just seek it out, break through whatever wardings Snape and the Headmaster have put on it, and then I'll bloody well destroy it, with or without its reflection attached. Because the reflection of a thing, like the name of a thing, is not the thing itself, but when the thing itself smashes into bits, I rather expect the reflection will follow suit. And mirrors -- even ones without their shadows still attached -- are notoriously fragile.

And as for the seven years' bad luck? Well, I reckon I've had worse.

I get as far as the third-level washroom before I run headlong into the first insurmountable obstacle: Snape, it seems, isn't a big fan of mirrors. He doesn't keep one anywhere in his office or his rooms. Not even his lav has one, though Merlin alone knows how he manages to shave. I suppose, considering what he'd have staring back at him, I can't blame the poor bastard -- if I were as ugly as he, I'd probably get tired of hearing a mirror's opinion of it right quickly.

But that miracle of momentary sympathy still isn't enough to get me any farther down the right bloody hallway. I'd go through the paintings if I still could, and am just about desperate enough to try despite what just happened upstairs, only I haven't any idea which portraits lead anywhere other than into the bloody wall. But I can't just give up. The memory of Harry's eyes, lust glazed and hungry, his hips shaping that word that didn't mean me -- that won't let me give up.

I'm on the point of going out and ripping through portraits at random until I find the right one, when who should come prancing in but Narcissa's pointy-faced little brat and his pug-nosed fanclub of one, neither of whom seem to care that this is meant to be the boy's lav. I wouldn't give a parp in the breeze for either of them, only something in Malfoy's whiny smugness catches my attention.

"-and Father says that's because the Dark Lord has great plans underway. Plans he can't leave to his underlings, and so he's letting his Chosen manage the herd for awhile. It's a terrific honour, you know." I wonder what Father would think of his trophy boy babbling that all over the school?

"Mm. Well, Papa told Mummy and me it's more like the Dark Lord's completely distracted," the girl says. I'd scoff at her knowing tone if I hadn't just seen a bloody riveting distraction myself. "He said the Inner Circle's fighting each other like pit wyverns, and the Dark Lord isn't even bothering to stop them. He said it could wind up costing the Faithful everything they've worked for if the Dark Lord doesn't snap out of it soon."

I'd happily snap him out of it -- by way of his neck!

"Then your father's a filthy liar, Parkinson!" Malfoy snarls, his face going blotchy and red. "The Dark Lord's working on Potter -- one look at Scarhead and any fool could see that. And your dad had better watch his mouth, because it's MY father who's running things for the Dark Lord until he's ready to put his plan into action!"

I can't help yawning. Fighting over the honour of head slave still makes you a slave in my book. And it doesn't bloody well help _me_ get down that right-hand corridor, does it? I press up against the mirror and make a face at the black-haired bird as she digs her lipstick out and smears it on, thick and scarlet.

"Well, your father _would_ say that, wouldn't he?" she shrugs. The colour's too bright for her skin -- makes the girl look like a newly turned vampire. But then again, for all I know that's the point of the stuff. She smacks her sticky lips together and checks her teeth. "But as for Potter, _you're_ the one with the obsession on everything he says or does, Draco, so I suppose I'll just have to take your word on that account."

By Godric's sword, even in this generation, Slytherins still seem to have the market cornered on boring as hell, _and_ aggravating beyond belief. I'm sick of their third-hand Death Eater gossip, and beyond sick of imagining that point-faced albino sniffing about after my Harry. I pace toward the door, intent on the portrait-rampage idea when a sudden flash, like sunlight on water, catches my eye.

Parkinson's turned her back to the glass, and is checking her hair, courtesy of a tiny hand mirror. It's no bigger than the Talkers, and it's smudged and dusted with whatever cack one finds in the bottom of a bird's purse, but it will bloody well DO! She's a Slytherin, isn't she? She'll have to go whinging to Snape sometime or other -- especially if she comes down with a mysterious case of boils!

But just as I'm about to step through, I feel a ferocious chill go down the back of my neck. It's enough to make me pause, make me look around for the source. Enough to make me gasp out loud when I find the Bloody Baron floating just behind me, silver-stained and scowling in his own gore -- scowling straight at me, with a look that could strip paint from the dungeon walls. Any question of him seeing me or not evaporates as he gives his head a ponderous shake, the plumes of his hat waving in the non-existent breeze. Somehow, I just _know_ that he can enforce that edict if I try him.

"Oh!" Parkinson gives a squeak and a jump as she catches sight of the ghost in her little mirror. "Sorry, your Grace, I didn't see you there."

Malfoy, spoiled little princeling that he is, doesn't bother with a greeting for his House Spectre, which makes me wonder if the Baron would object as much to _him_ coming down with the boils. Something tells me if he did, it'd be mostly out of duty.

I don't get the chance to find out, sadly. The Bloody Baron waves an imperious arm at the door, his finger pointing the way, and his glare informing the young snakes of the dangers of disobedience. At which point they both wait exactly long enough to make the leaving seem as though it was their idea all along before slithering off to wherever the junior Death Eaters hang out.

And I suppose that's defeat, isn't it? At least it's a setback. I've only another week before Yule Hols, but I'm sure I wouldn't have all _that_ long to wait before I can manage to catch another Slytherin bird pausing for a primp in the glass. Girls are girls, after all, even Slytherin ones.

"Know thou, Sir Grimm, that men live yet in the world, who envy the ghostly state?" The Baron's voice is like a mile of bad road -- rough, rumbling, and thick with sharpness and grit. I can't help gaping at him. Not only have I never heard him speak, I'd never even _heard_ of anyone who thought he _could_ speak. The going wager in the Common Room when I was in school was that the Baron's ambitious young wife had cut his throat to keep him from denouncing her as a traitor, and his voice had stayed dead when he had not. If I had a heartbeat now, there's some Gryffindors I know who'd be crying over having to pay up on _that_ wager!

"Er," I fumble for the words when his impatient expression makes it plain he expects an answer. "Yeah. I've heard that." I decide not to bring up Voldemort and evasion of the discorporate state -- don't exactly know where old Bloody's sympathies lie, after all.

"Trembling fools, I'll wot," he says with a nod, as though over a tea table rather than a urinal. "So whelméd 'neath the living yoke as to suppose a spectre hath no cause for fear." If possible, his laugh is worse than his speaking voice -- thick and bitter with irony. "What goods hath left the dead to lose? And what force may sunder ghostly flesh, or deal death unto the un-living?"

"That's bollocks," I frown, bracing my arms across my breast. "There's always-"

"Aye, we ken it, thou and I," he cuts me off. "The like of us hath an inkling what yet remains to lose. Think you, Sir Grim," and here he drifts close up to the mirror, leveling that steel-spike glare at me, "knew they just know how far beyond the dying they could yet fall, should those trembling souls e'er find courage to die at all?"

I can't tell if it's a riddle, a warning, or a threat. Why can't Slytherins ever, EVER just say what it is they mean? "Look," I snap at him. "What do you want with me -- to warn me off your sprogs? All right -- consider me warned, but if there's something else on your mind, Bloody old mate, you'd better have it out plain. I'm only a simple grim, after all."

He rolls his eyes and turns toward the door. I suppose he's disgusted by my lack of doubletalk, and that's fine with me -- this conversation's going nowhere anyway. But he turns back just before passing through the door and offers me a glare down the length of his nose. "The Headmaster bespeaks thy Ward in the Lion's Tower, Grim," he says, and I notice he's dropped the 'Sir'. "I bethink me, woulds't thou fain be as canny as thou'rt lucky, perforce thou shoulds't attend unto their treat. Still, as thour't but a simple Grim, mayhap it better suits thee to lose _all_ instead."

Much as I'd like to stay and teach him how we insult each other in _this_ century, I find I've more important things to do. I tear out of the dungeons, pushing through the thin, watery spots between far-spaced mirrors on the strength of momentum and determination alone. The other ghosts are nowhere to be seen as I race for Gryffindor Tower. The Fat Lady's portrait hangs askew and empty, and Merlin, but I'm going to have to make that up to her somehow.

Later, later.

Right now, I have to find Dumbledore and Harry, and -- ah. There they are, talking in his dorm with privacy wards on the door. No trouble at all. I slip sidelong and softly into the trunk-lid mirror, which still stands propped open at the foot of his bed. I don't want Harry to spook and shut the trunk again, after all. But if he does see me, his eyes don't so much as flicker away from the Headmaster's face.

"So you've decided then?" he asks.

"I have, Harry," Dumbledore says. "I have decided that you may borrow Erised." I close my eyes, breath stilling into a horrified chill beneath my heart. "I will deliver it into your hands on the afternoon of December the twenty-first, just as you've asked," he goes on. "And I shall expect you to return it to me the next morning. I trust," he peers over his spectacles, "that will be enough time for you to enact your plans?"

Harry nods, and perhaps he does look just a bit paler than he ought to, but that glint is back in his eye. And Merlin, but I wish I could find comfort in that. "Should be, sir," he says.

"Just so." Dumbledore agrees, folding his hands in his voluminous sleeves. "You may, of course, choose to take me into your confidence at any time… no, I rather didn't suppose so. Very well then, you have my word that I will not interfere in your plans unless you ask."

"No, " I can't help it, can't stay silent and watch while he hands Voldemort every single damn thing he needs! "No, Albus please don't. Don't give it to him!"

Maybe Harry's eyes flicker this way, maybe they don't. He does cock his head suspiciously and ask, "What do I have to do for you?"

Dumbledore at least gives him the courtesy of not pretending this is anything more than quid pro quo. "You, Harry, must accept full membership in the Order of the Phoenix," he says. "With all the oaths and bindings attendant upon that honour. It is a man's trust you are asking me for, and you must be prepared to offer a man's collateral for it."

Part of me wants Harry to refuse -- wants Voldemort to try and _make_ Harry refuse. Anything to break this cover-act, anything to make it plain just what sort of a power play is happening behind those green eyes. But this is still my Harry, my own young lion with his prey in sight, and his pride lining up behind him, and have I not always wanted that for him? Have I not lived for the day when he would stand at the head of the Order and lead us over the top of the bastards who took Lily and James away from us?

No. The oaths and bindings are a good thing. They are. They'll make it harder for Voldemort to wriggle around the edges. Not impossible, but at least he'll have to work for it this time.

"And what else?" Harry asks.

Dumbledore looks a bit surprised at the question, but doesn't hesitate to answer it. "Aside from the oaths, I expect you to choose two adult members of the Order who will accompany you while you are in possession of the Mirror of Erised." Harry's brow clouds, and Dumbledore raises a hand to ward off the storm. "The mirror is a powerful artefact, and, as I have explained to you before, it can be deadly in its own way. I could not allow any member of the Order to use it for such a long time without ensuring that he or she would not be alone should the worst happen. And I've a feeling in my knee that the worst is very much on offer here, or do I miss my guess, Harry?"

"You don't trust me," Harry bites out, his cheeks burning.

"I do not trust Erised," the Headmaster corrects. "Even Professor Snape has had the Castle Ghosts' assistance with the mirror this past fortnight, lest it do _him_ a mischief."

Harry blinks, snit abruptly forgotten. "Snape's had it?"

I bang my head against the bedpost.

"_Professor_ Snape, Harry. At my request, he has been attempting to determine why the mirror casts neither shadow nor reflection."

"Oh," Harry says, just a trifle too straight-faced. "And… did he?"

Dumbledore shakes his head. "Alas, the mystery remains, but perhaps your endeavors upon the Solstice may shed some more light upon the matter. Assuming," he pauses to deal out a significant look, "that you are prepared to agree to my terms of the loan?"

I hold my breath, because here's the simple math of it: If Harry refuses, it'll mean that Voldemort's winning. It'll mean that I have to somehow become astonishingly clever in the next five days, and find a way to destroy Voldemort, the mirror, or my Godson before all three arrive in the same place on Yule.

"I'll do it, Sir." Harry says, and I breathe again. "I'll take the Oaths after exams are done."

The twinkle returns to Dumbledore's eyes, though the rest of his face doesn't shift. "And your companions? Or would you prefer a bit of time to consider your options?"

Harry nods. "Yeah, I need to think about who… although, I don't suppose you know whether Charlie Weasley's planning to be in England for Yule hols?"

"I can certainly ask," Dumbledore allows, rising from his chair and turning toward the door, "Though I cannot but suppose he would be more than willing to come home just to be of assistance to you, if you asked it."

The move Harry makes is half shrug, half grimace. "I only thought he might have meant to come and visit Remus, is all."

"I'll find out, Harry."

I tell myself, as Dumbledore sweeps from the dormitory, that I'm relieved. Whatever Harry's scheme is, Moony will keep it rightways up if anyone can. And Charlie's a solid bloke, isn't he? A brick. A gingery, freckled brick, but I'm relieved it'll be them. I'm not afraid. And certainly not gut-twistingly jealous.

"Harry," I sigh -- aloud, because what's the point in stealth when he's not listening anyway? I curl my fingers over the lonely, abandoned talking mirror in my pocket. Perhaps if I Name him as he did to me -- if I roll him into an endless whisper of longing and despair, if I fill his reflection's ears with _Harryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharryharry_ \-- Would he begin to hear me in time? __

_"Sirius." My name on Harry's lips buzzes through me like a stunning spell._

_I turn on my heel, stare at him through the icy barrier pane because I can't believe I haven't deluded myself into hearing it. Harry hasn't Named me aloud in weeks, but now he's staring at me, with his talking mirror -- his own talking mirror -- pressed close against his lips, so that only his fierce green eyes are visible over it. "Sirius please," he says as I blink hard to keep him in focus, "Please just trust me. Trust me for just a little while longer. If you can."_

_Anything. _Anything_. I wipe the frost from my cheeks and nod. I can give him that, though hope may be all I have left to give. Because what, besides my faith, have I left to give him?_

 

~*~

 

"And you're not to come in," Harry says, voice low and urgent in the amphitheatre's echoing gloom. "Not until I call you, no matter what you hear -- or smell," he adds with a glance at Remus. "It's very important. You have to promise."

"Somehow I don't think that's what Dumbledore had in mind when he sent us in here with you, Harry," Weasley says, fidgeting on the bottommost step. "And I think if he knew you'd meant to come back to the Department of Mysteries tonight, I sincerely doubt he'd have allowed-"

Remus lays a hand on Weasley's arm and shakes his head once. "Charles," he says, "Leave be."

Charles, is it? I scowl and move behind Harry's reflection possessively.

"But Remus, this is mad!" He waves his hand at the dais, and the hulking stone they've all been doing their best not to look at since they first walked into the room. The one I've been taking particular care to _keep_ in sight. "That Veil killed Sirius Black! Nobody really knows exactly what it can do, or where it goes -- and you want to leave Harry _and_ the mirror of Erised in here alone with it?"

"No, I don't want to," Remus says, holding Harry's gaze, as though by that alone he can forestall the building snit we can all see the kid working up to. "I want to stay in here and see exactly what he's going to try and do. I want him to explain it all to me first, to show me his research notes, quote his sources, and give me some kind of reassurance that tonight isn't going to become a new feature in my nightmares."

Hell, I'd rather like that myself. But I've been watching Harry closely this last few days, and I've seen the gears whirling behind his sudden stillnesses, his flickering glances at whatever mirror I'm haunting, his constant patting of his right front pocket, making sure his Talking mirror is still there and whole. He can hardly explain what he's doing -- he doesn't know himself.

But I promised him trust, and by Godric, trust he shall have, even if it kills me.

Again.

Harry, of course, only looks away from Remus' patient stare and bites his lip.

"But then again, I'm used to not getting what I want," Remus sighs after a moment. "And if I have to do this on faith, at least I know that Harry's the last person in the world who will be reckless around that Veil. It's already cost him too much."

"And that's good enough for you?" Weasley asks in patent disbelief. Harry's scowl could burn through stone, but Weasley seems completely oblivious to it, focused entirely on swaying Remus around to back up his intervention.

And Moony, the best of us all at calling (and beating) the odds, gives a sober nod. "Yes, Charles, I do." He lets the ginge sputter for a moment, then cocks his head in a measuring gaze. "Why isn't it enough for you?"

"Well, because I have questions-"

"Fine," Harry bites out, slinging his bag to the floor and bracing his hands on his hips, every inch of him vibrating with dare. "Go ahead -- ask me a question then!"

And Merlin, but it's a laugh to watch Weasley struggle for it. Even Moony has trouble keeping his lips from twitching. "What's- what are you planning?" Weasley manages at last.

Harry boosts his chin. "An experiment."

"What _kind_ of an experiment?"

That gets an eyeroll. "The kind where you need an arch and a mirror and a bit of sodding _privacy_, obviously!"

I have the luxury of snickering openly when Weasley goes all pink at that. Moony has to make do with a cough, and Harry a smirk. "Well… What've you got in the bag then?" He challenges, as if to make up the coup.

"Charles."

"No, it's all right," Harry growls, dropping to his knees and undoing the flap. "Go ahead and search it if you're really so sure I'm going to betray you!"

"Harry," Remus says.

"Hey now, I never said-" Charlie sputters.

Harry rolls right on over both of them. "But I have to say, I think this is a pretty way to treat someone who's meant to be your ally, isn't it? Would you act like this if you were here with Snape?" And at least they've the grace to look abashed. "I mean sure, he's older than me, but I'm not a Death Eater, am I? And I _did_ swear all the same oaths as you did. Do you think I was lying?"

"That's not what I-" says Weasley.

Remus takes hold of his arm as if he's prying the shovel out of the idiot's hands. "No, Harry, nobody thought you were lying."

"Yeah, it's just-" Weasley goes on digging.

"Do you want us to keep a lookout on both doors, or do you mind if we wait together?" Remus makes his point at last, as much by the pressure of his fingers digging into Weasley's arm as by the tone of his voice. I never worked out exactly how Remus Lupin could make a polite tone of voice into such an inexorable command, but even I'd never managed to stand up to it. I suppose it must be a werewolf thing.

"It doesn't matter," Harry accepts the not-apology with more grace than I think I might have done. "You'll know it if I need you, I promise."

"We'll be ready when you call then," Remus promises and turning, starts up the steps. "Charles?"

Weasley hesitates, scowling over Harry's shoulder at the hulking arch and whispering veil. For a moment I think he might make another grab for the shovel, but then he stops to take a look at Harry's face. I can't say what it is he sees there -- a lack of fear or the proper respect, determination or resourcefulness, blind hope or well-earned confidence, or maybe just that scar peeking out from under his fringe like living proof that the kid's luck comes through. Harry only stands there and waits, while for my part, I wonder if I could resolve the stand-off with a quick hex, and would it be worth Harry's ire to watch that freckled git's face go all over spotty.

"Charlie." Remus uses the Voice again and Weasley breaks the tableau with a shiver.

"Yeah, all right Harry," he says, and follows his would-be lover up to the door, "But if you need us-"

"I'll call," Harry says. "I Promise."

Then the door snicks shut, and sends the full stop echoes skittering.

 

~*~

 

Put a man on the edge of a precipice -- wind in his face, heart in his mouth, and toes at the edge, nudging pebbles out into gravity's grip -- and you can learn a lot about him.

Most will look down, fascination or fear shocking them still as they stare the abyss in the face and can't look away. Maybe it's their death they're staring at in all that empty space between their toes and the sudden stop at the end of the drop. Or maybe their minds are transfixed by something more abstract, measuring distances, calculating odds or rate of decent, but either way it's the same -- for that edge-on moment, down is the only direction that exists for them.

Others, like Snape, look around behind them, preferring to put the drop at their backs rather than take the risk that an enemy will put them over it without them knowing. People like that are rather likely to jump off themselves -- either to spite anyone who might be thinking of pushing them, or else by accident when they startle at a passing shadow.

And then there's men like me. Put me on the edge of a cliff, and I can't keep my eyes off the horizon. It's not that I don't see the fall, or don't understand just what a long way down it really is, or what landing would do to me. It's not that I'm unaware of the vulnerability of my position -- I, who have been pushed to my doom on no less than two very memorable occasions, have become rather sensitive to that kind of peril, thank you.

It's just that the sky is so _very_ large from here, and so close, in a way, that one almost thinks one could offer God a fag and a pint, and that the old man would laugh and stand his round. And there's miles and miles of possibility stretching out beyond the six-or-so feet of earth below me, where my death might or might not be lurking. Miles, leagues of ground where a man could walk or a grim could run, or a broom could fly for days. And when the world spreads out before me like that, how can I possibly believe I'm not to taste of it?

Then laugh at the drop, spit once over the edge, then turn around and walk away. And that's the kind of man I am, I suppose.

I know I'm on the precipice tonight. I know it in the Veil Chorus's endless, idiot question, stirring about my face like the wind from below. I know it in the calm that spreads through my bones like a drug as I watch Harry pull the Mirror of Erised out of his satchel, set it to face the Veil, and then enlarge it until the two frames balance like menhirs across the length of the dais. I know it in the gritty chill of the Arch's ancient stones under my fingers as I face into the rustling Veil and just… look. There's a horizon here, I can feel it. My whole Self yearns toward it like a compass needle seeking North. I only want for Harry to show me which way my Pole lies.

Because he knows -- that much is certain. He might not know what, exactly, he's doing here, but there's something in him that's attuned to the Way of Things. I can tell that in how he sets his talking mirror at right angles to the Arch and Erised, but then moves it three times before he's satisfied with its placement. I can tell it in the way he looks for a long moment at his wand before placing it and the satchel on one of the benches. He's feeling his way, just as I did when this thing between he and I began -- no guide but his instincts, no guardian but his heart. As if there could ever be a better.

I spit through the Veil, then turn my back on it. Harry's just there when I turn, staring as I did, at the blowing tatters, listening to the Chorus, peering at the unseen horizon as the conjunctions begin to line up. Death looms before him, dreams behind him, faith cracked and battered, but whole at his right hand. I place its mended reflection -- my own desperate hope -- in the remaining quarter, and it feels right, right, _right_ as Harry's image blossoms across it.

There's power here -- more ritual than spell, and more instinct than either -- the elegance of it, the simplicity and symmetry takes my breath away. Three mirrors like a cauldron of glass, and the Veil like twisting steam above it. This is what Magic was once; form and symbol and will and want pressing potential into fact and laughing in the face of logic. Power, rising like flame from the sum of simple, primal connections, reflections, selections -- spinning gold from straw, building a fortress from nothing more than snow and song and the power of a Name. The Name of a thing, which, like the reflection of a thing, is not _quite_ the thing itself…

Harry glances at me -- just a flicker of green beneath his glasses, but I understand the summons. I fancy, as I go to his side, that I can sense Voldemort, entranced and distracted by the mirror-faced doppleganger behind Harry's determined stare. That thought would have panicked me once -- _did_ panic me last week, in fact -- but now it's just like the cliff's edge, and he's no more than a dark smudge of possibility below. A lurking shadow of maybe, but maybe not. Because if Harry doesn't know what he's doing, and if I don't know what he's doing, how likely can it be that Voldemort will? How likely can it be that he'll spare one glance from exactly the sight Harry wants him to see shining out of that mirrored, vulnerable face? How likely is it that Erised's known all along what it meant to do?

Whatever does happen, one thing's certain -- it'll be interesting.

I move behind Harry, place myself between him and Erised's chilly face. I wind my arms about his warm, slender reflection, and complete the company of seen and unseen in the glassy enclosure. Arch and Mirror, Talker and Reflection, Godfather, Godson, and Spirit Unholy.

Halle-fucking-lujah

"Sirius," Harry says, and his reflection leans back into my embrace. "I'm still a virgin, did you know that?" He laughs, a dry little sound, and slides his robe off his shoulders. "I figure you probably do. I figure that's probably why you would never do anything with me beyond… well, you know."

It isn't why -- not really. I shake my head, but he doesn't wait for my reply. "I've been reading your book. The one you gave me last summer, remember? There's a lot more in it than legilimency, but I guess you probably know that too." He toes off his trainers, kicks them out of the circle, and tosses his socks after. "There's a whole chapter on blood -- how to use it, how to weigh it, how to get power out of it -- I figured it was pretty dark stuff, but then I thought, with _him_ still out there, I had better look into it anyway, you know?"

I know. Dear Merlin, I wish I didn't know, but I do. He shrugs off my hold and begins unbuttoning his shirt while I try and resist the urge to shiver. I fix my eyes on the line of his throat as the shirt comes away, the graceful arch of his shoulders, the winging scapulae, and the spine, like hidden gems beneath his velvety skin. I can see gooseflesh rise as he continues.

"It took me awhile to puzzle it out on my own," he says. " I couldn't very well let Hermione read that bit to me, could I? Anyway, I know I didn't understand a lot of it, but I did get one thing; it said that blood, offered freely, was a very powerful thing. And virgin blood was the most powerful of all."

"No," I say, grabbing his reflection by the shoulders. I give him a shake then tug him back into a fierce hug. "You're no damned sacrifice, Harry! I won't have it -- not for me!"

He doesn't respond. Maybe he doesn't hear, though the talking mirrors hold us both between them. His hands move over my arms in a brief, reassuring caress before he thumbs open the snap of his trousers and tugs them down over his narrow hips. I close my eyes, bury my nose in his hair and breathe him in for strength. The precipice seems quite different to me, now that I realize I'm not the only one standing on the edge.

Harry gives a sigh, and his hands slip off mine, drift downward to caress his chest, his belly, to trail his seeker-quick fingers through the downy, dark thatch that's just beginning to spring up beneath his belly. I see his cock give a twitch as he grazes it with his thumb, and I don't know what he's doing, but maybe I'm beginning to get the idea.

"I've been hearing those voices in my head for so long," Harry says, nodding at the Veil, and the unseen Chorus behind it. "Always this question, over and over, for months since you died." He strokes deliberately along his cock, and shudders his arse against my own very interested member. "I've had the shadow of my dearest wish inside my head since school began as well. And I've had you -- almost had you, I mean -- for long enough to know for sure what I want."

He's fully hard now, and so am I. I slide my palms over his chest and belly, as low as I can reach while still holding him firm against me, nudging my erection between the softness of his arsecheeks, and searching my soul for any ghost of my previous reticence. I'm somehow not surprised that I can't find a trace of it.

And even less surprised that Harry seems to know that too. "What do I want…" he sighs. "I want to give you my virgin blood. I want to give you life, and I know you want to take it from me." He pushes out of my hold, leaves me trembling with want, and burning with the loss of him as he drops to his knees to search through his robe's pockets. "I think it's time we both took what we want," he says palming a small bottle of oil.

Some inexorable gravity draws me away from his kneeling reflection. It wheels me about to face into Erised's steaming chill just as Harry -- the real Harry -- turns around himself, raises his green, green eyes to mine, and steps up close to the glass. "It's time now, Sirius," he says, laying his palm flat against Erised's pane, just over my heart. "Please."

And suddenly it's right. What was always wrong before, the idea that had always made the fabric of my dead self shiver with dread, now makes me hard and hot and hungry as my beautiful Harry kneels up against the glass, pours the oil down between his spread cleft, and reaches back to press his fingers in.

I know what I'm doing.

I'm kneeling down behind him/ his reflection/ him, only him, and I'm kissing the velvet at the base of his spine so that he shivers and arches back against my lips. I'm trailing my own fingers through the oil that drips from his bollocks, and I'm pulling his hand away to replace it with mine. I'm curling one hand around his eager, scarlet cock, oiling its length with long, firm strokes while inside him, my fingers press and roll, stretch and flex, and mercilessly tease his swelling prostate.

Harry comes suddenly, with a wailing cry of protest. I hold him through the spasms, stilling my fingers within his gripping, silken arse, but not removing them as he sobs out his release.

"Sirius," he gasps, just the faintest shadow of childish petulance in his voice. "That's not- Why did you-"

"Shhhh," I tell him, leaning close to press the words to his ear. "I know what I'm doing."

"But I _want_ you!"

"Hush," I remind him, bringing my fingers, slick and dripping with his virgin seed, to the barrier pane. He looks up, wide eyed as I begin tracing the Arch's shape across the mirror's face. Can't leave a place when here isn't any door, after all. I see the understanding spark in his eyes, and then he reaches down, trailing his fingers through the come he spilled across the floor, and raising it to follow mine. I slow, let him catch up, then share a gasp with him at the spark that buzzes between us when his finger rests opposite mine. Magic. Oh yeah.

Our strokes line up after that, limning the form of each stone in wet translucence, tracing the faint, shadowy markings, drawing in everything except for the Veil that hangs within it.

My other hand is not still in the meantime. I keep on sliding my fingers into him, long smooth strokes to keep his flesh easy, to gentle the passage that's never known my -- or any other -- touch. I can feel his virgin blood in the pulse that clamps, close and silken-tight around me. It surges around my knuckles as though I stroked his beating heart, and he gasps and shivers with every inward press. Sweat gathers between his shoulderblades like fragrant, smooth-polished diamonds -- so beautiful I can't bear to lick them off.

Harry is hard again by the time we've drawn the last stone. He presses his forehead to the glass, lets fall his finger from the final smudge, and pants out my name, dark eyed and nearly delirious with want. And sweet Merlin's arse, but I want him no less.

"Please," he begs, arching back against my fingers, shivering so hard I can feel it inside him. "Sirius, _please_."

_Yes._

I slick myself along his cleft, gathering up the last of the oil before I curl my fingers -- all four inside him now -- into a path for my cock to follow. He grunts as I press inward, flinches when my fingers slip suddenly out, leaving him gripping the head, and oh Merlin but it's hard not to come right then. I'm reeling in that satin heat, and just hearing the whine in his breath is nearly too much for me. I have to hold still, fingers hooked desperately over Harry's hips, thumbs pressing hard into the twin dimples that frame his sacrum.

He looks up at my stillness, and his unguarded gaze meets mine, locking fast across Erised's come-stained face. Can I see the Dark Lord's ghostly thoughtself in those eyes? Can I glimpse him, curled like a strangling python, around a boy who's no more than a figment of wishful desire? Is he in there, so fascinated with his own reflection in his Not-Harry's face that he could possibly be missing this? Doesn't he know what's about to happen?

"Sirius." No trace of pleading in Harry's voice now -- this is command, plain and simple. "Move," he says. "Now."

I drive into him all at once, split his virgin arse wide around my length, and echo his yelp. There's a sting, a shock, a spark as his blood completes the sum, fills this glassy cauldron to overflowing. Then I can't hold still, can't wait for it not to hurt him, can't be gentle. His blood and mine force me forward, drive me in and in and in again, roll his still-slick cock through my fist in time with each grunt, each gasp, each sizzle of chain lightning that leaps along my spine as I trust into his boiling, silken _magic_.

And then I'm there -- the threshold, the precipice -- so close I can smell forever over the spunk and sweat and frost ozone and sex and sex and sex. And I know I know I know _exactly_ what I'm doing. I'm leaning in, close and tight to the trembling back of the boy beneath me, smearing those diamond beads across my chest as I growl in his ear. "Say my name!"

He does -- shouts it loud as he comes, pulling my orgasm, my breath, my soul out of me with the rippling force. The cauldron boils over with a scream. It can't contain the sweat, the seed, the blood, the need, and him and me and that helpless, hapless not-quite-ghost trapped in the mirror inside his head. Erised flexes, bows out wildly, twisting the world like the bright-polished side of Horseface's tea kettle -- pregnant with unspeakable force. I reel against the straining, smoking-hot barrier, drive myself deep one last time so I can slap my palm over Harry's head. So I can smash my hand into the center of the door we've made, and shout the password.

"HARRY!"

Glass flies everywhere, spinning and howling like a zephyr with razor teeth. The boy in my arms is twisting, writhing, gasping and gloriously _real_. He arches hard, convulsively away from me -- his spine twisting, his mouth stretched wide to the flying glass-storm in a silent scream, and all I can do is hold on, cover his pale body with my own, and wait for the end.

Harry gives another great twist, and silvery light bursts like lightning from his eyes, his mouth, his scar -- it screams, that light, in a voice I refuse to recognize as the shards of Erised sweep it up, catch it close, slice it fine and thin and helpless in the air above us.

Can a thought die? Can a nightmare be smashed like glass and sucked through a gaping stone mouth to Oblivion? And would that mass of sound and fury shred the Veil to dust as it passed through? Would it make the ancient stones shiver and groan, as though straining to swallow such a force? And would the massive blocks topple inward in the stunned silence that followed, their mortar pouring out like grave dust between them as they crashed to the floor?

Fuck if I know.

Because Harry -- my own Harry -- is clinging to me, shaking and moaning as his "Siriusiriusirius" fills my ears and heart so full I can't make myself care two shits about all the rest.

"Harry," I say, smoothing the sweat and blood from his forehead. "Harry."

His green eyes are open, fever-bright, but focused on my face, and though he's shaking and pale and limp as a wrung flannel, he's _here_, and he's aware, and he's real. And so am I. And I'm stroking him, and I'm kissing his cheeks, his nose, his jaw and his throat, and it's really HIM -- really my Harry, and not his reflection, and I have never, in all my life or death, felt so fucking perfect.

"Hi Sirius," Harry says presently, carding his fingers into my hair and using that grip to pull me back a little. "All right there?"

I bark a laugh, and nuzzle a salty kiss to the inside of his wrist. "You," I tell him in a thick, tight voice, "are bloody well mental."

"You'd be the one to know," he breathes a laugh, blinking fast.

"What possessed you to try that, anyway?" I ask him.

And then he smiles. "You," he says, as if it's the stupidest question he's ever heard.

I can hear, I suddenly realize, that Moony and Weasley are calling from the other side of the door. Their fists make dull thuds on the thick oak, and I don't suppose they're going to wait much longer before they come charging to the rescue.

Then there'll be questions and doubts and worries and horrors while the Order scrambles to discover what trade was made between me and Harry and the veil and the slice of Voldemort that went screaming through it. And then there'll be tears and shouting and not-quite-understanding, while Moony and Weasley and Harry and me sort out where all of us fit in relation to each others.

But after all that's done, and we all step back from the cliff again, I think there'll be something there that wasn't before -- something fetched back from that far-off horizon of possibility we glimpsed today. A hope, a plan, even something as fragile and simple as a dream for the future. Something too big to fit between an arch of fallen stone or a mirror's twisted, empty frame. Something golden. Something ours.

But for right now, tangled with my Harry, naked and sweaty against gritty floor, it only seems fair to indulge in a slow, sweet, reverent kiss. The kind of kiss we should have had from the very beginning, if the world were anything like fair.

Fin.


End file.
